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Potted Turkey
Draw and singe a turkey and bone it. Cut the flesh off the thighs, trim off all the sinews and chop it fine. Chop one pound of fat bacon and one-half pound of lean veal, mix them with the chopped turkey flesh, season with salt and spices and pound the whole in a mortar. Lard the breasts of the turkey with the seasoned strips of fat bacon. Place a layer of the pounded mixture of forcemeat at the bottom of a potting jar. Spread out the turkey, skin downward, dust it over with spices and slat, cover the inside with a layer of forcemeat, roll the bird up, place it in the jar, spread the remaining forcemeat over it, put some thin rashers of fat bacon and a bay leaf on top and place the cover on the jar. Stand the jar in a large stewpan, pour in water to about one-third its height, place the stewpan in the oven and cook the turkey for about three hours. When cooked remove the jar from the oven, leave it until cold, then cover the contents with a layer of poultry dripping. The turkey should not be served until two days or more after it has been potted.
This is a galantine in all but name: a boned bird rolled around its own forcemeat, cooked slowly in a water bath and sealed under fat. The technique holds up, but the vessel, the oven and the storage all need translating.
- The hinge: cook it gently and to temperatureThe point of standing the jar in water is to keep the forcemeat below the temperature at which it breaks and weeps fat. Hold the oven at 325F and pull the jar when the centre of the roll reads 160-165F on an instant-read thermometer; three hours is a guide for a large bird, not a rule.
- "Potting jar"A straight-sided stoneware or earthenware crock with a lid, tall enough to take the rolled bird. A lidded terrine mould or a deep enamelled cast-iron pot works; cover with a lid or a double layer of foil so the surface does not dry.
- "Slat" is saltA typesetting slip in the original. Season firmly throughout: forcemeat this rich takes roughly 1.5 percent salt by weight of the total meat. The recipe never says which spices; a quatre-epices-style blend of white pepper with nutmeg, clove and ginger or cinnamon is a plausible reading, but it is a guess.
- Boning the birdAsk a butcher to bone the turkey whole, leaving the skin intact, or work down the backbone with a boning knife and keep the skin unpunctured. A 10-12 lb bird gives a very large roll; a boned turkey breast or a whole boned chicken scales the recipe down sensibly.
- The mortarA food processor replaces the mortar. Work the chilled bacon, veal and thigh meat in short pulses, keeping everything cold, and stop while the mixture is still slightly coarse rather than pasty.
- LardingThreading strips of fat bacon through the breast with a larding needle is optional insurance against dry white meat. Wrapping the breast in thin sheets of back fat or streaky bacon does the same job with less equipment.
- Storage, and the fat sealThe layer of poultry dripping was the period's method of excluding air for keeping at cellar temperature. Treat it as a flavour and moisture seal only: chill the potted turkey and keep it refrigerated, and eat it within about a week. Sealed fat over meat held at room temperature is exactly the anaerobic condition that favours Clostridium botulinum.
- The two-day waitNot a preservation step but a maturing one. The salt and spice distribute, the fat sets, and the roll firms enough to slice cleanly. Slice it cold, about a quarter-inch thick.
- YieldA whole boned turkey with a pound of bacon and half a pound of veal makes a buffet quantity, comfortably 20 to 30 servings as a cold cut with pickles and bread.
Potting is the older English answer to the French terrine: meat cooked down, packed tight in a crock and sealed under a cap of clarified fat or butter so it would keep in a cool larder through the winter. By the time Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maitre d'hotel, put this in his 1896 book, potted turkey had become what it is here, a cold buffet centrepiece for a hotel that fed New York's supper crowds after the theatre. The construction, a boned bird rolled around a forcemeat of its own dark meat with veal and pork fat, is essentially a galantine, and the recipe reads like French charcuterie wearing an English name. The instruction to wait two days before serving reflects the charcutier's craft custom that a terrine is never at its best on the day it is made.