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Minced Turkey with Poached Eggs
Singe and draw a turkey weighing about eight pounds, boil it gently until cooked, then drain and leave it until it is cool. Cut all the flesh off the bones, chop it fine, mix with it two breakfast cupfuls of finely-grated breadcrumbs. Place the bones and trimmings of the turkey in a saucepan with an onion and three quarts of broth, boil quickly till it is reduced to half its former quantity, and then strain it. Put a lump of butter in a saucepan with one tablespoonful of flour and stir it over the fire until browned, then mix in gradually the strained broth, season it with salt and pepper and stir it over the fire until boiling; then put in the minced turkey and breadcrumbs, and continue stirring until it is hot all through. Take up the mince in breakfast cupfuls, flatten it, turn it out onto a hot dish, place a poached egg on each mound, and serve.
A hotel luncheon dish built to use up a boiled turkey, and it works best when read as a hash bound with crumbs rather than as a creamed mince. Two things decide the outcome: how far you reduce the broth, and what kind of breadcrumbs you use.
- The thickening is the crumbs, not the flourOne tablespoon of flour into roughly six cups of broth is barely a suggestion of body; the grated breadcrumbs do the real work of holding the mince together. Add the broth gradually and stop when the mixture will just hold a mound on a spoon — you may not need all of it.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup runs about 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so read it as a generous cup. Two cupfuls of crumbs to the meat of an 8 lb turkey is a lot of bread; start with one and add more only if the mince is loose.
- Grated breadcrumbs"Finely-grated" here means crumbs rubbed from a dry, stale loaf, not the sandy commercial kind and not soft fresh crumbs. Panko will stay too coarse and distinct; dry your own bread and grate or pulse it fine.
- Boiling the turkeyAn 8 lb bird simmered gently needs roughly 2 to 2 1/2 hours, and the thigh should read 165F. Keep it at a bare tremble — a hard boil shreds the breast and clouds the broth you are about to use.
- Reducing the brothThree quarts down to a scant 1 1/2 quarts, then strained. Do this while the turkey cools rather than "quickly" over high heat; hard boiling drives off aroma and can turn the stock bitter from the onion skins if you leave them on.
- SaltIf you use canned or boxed broth, do not season until after the reduction. Halving an already-salted commercial stock will overshoot badly, and the crumbs absorb salt unevenly.
- The browned rouxCook the butter and flour to a light hazelnut colour, no darker — this is a brown sauce in miniature and burnt flour will show through the mild turkey.
- Poaching and servingPoach the eggs last, in barely simmering water with a splash of vinegar, about 3 minutes for a set white and liquid yolk. The mince will hold in a covered pan off the heat. Figure six to eight mounds from an 8 lb bird, one egg each.
- Shaping the moundsA cup used as a mould works, but warm and lightly butter it first or the mince will stick and break. Flatten the top so the egg sits level.
Oscar Tschirky was the maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, not strictly its chef, and the 1896 Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf collects a very large number of terse entries associated with the hotel's kitchen. Dishes like this one read as the frugal underside of a luxury operation — a whole boiled turkey yields the mince, its carcass yields the sauce. Minced or hashed meat crowned with a poached egg was common American hotel breakfast and luncheon fare of the period, in the same family as corned beef hash and the various "hash à la" preparations that filled club menus; the egg supplied both richness and the sauce that a thinly thickened gravy could not. Boiled turkey itself, common in nineteenth-century American cooking and now rare as a practice, gave pale, mild meat and a quantity of good broth in one operation.