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Roasted Turkey Stuffed with Chestnuts
Singe, draw and truss the bird as for roasting; peel fifty or sixty chestnuts, blanch them in boiling water until the inner skin can be easily removed, and then boil them until soft; drain and chop them very fine. Empty two marrow bones, and cut the marrow into small pieces; mix these and the chestnuts together, season the mixture with a small quantity of salt and stuff the turkey with it. Cover the breast with a sheet of buttered paper, lay the bird on a bakingpan, and roast it in a hot oven, basting it constantly with butter. When nearly cooked, take the paper off the turkey, sprinkle over some flour and a little salt, and baste it with butter till frothed and browned. When cooked, place the bird on a hot dish, pour a little chestnut sauce over it, and serve with a sauceboatful of rich brown gravy, and a sauceboatful of bread sauce.
A straightforward late-Victorian roast turkey whose only real complication is the stuffing: chopped chestnut bound with beef marrow rather than bread. The original assumes a cook who knows the bird's weight, the oven's mood and the three sauces by heart.
- Bird size is not givenBird size is not given. The chestnut quantity suits a large bird, in the 12-16 lb range; for a 10 lb turkey use about two-thirds of the stuffing.
- Fifty or sixty chestnutsRoughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb in the shell, yielding perhaps 1 1/2 to 2 lb peeled, depending on size. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts work: about 1 1/2 lb, simmered until soft enough to chop to a coarse paste.
- Marrow bones"Empty two marrow bones" means push or scrape out the soft marrow — around 4 to 6 oz from two good beef shanks. Ask a butcher for canoe-cut bones; soaking them in cold water an hour makes the marrow release cleanly. Chill it before dicing or it smears.
- A hot ovenRead as roughly 425F. The original roasts throughout at that heat; in a modern oven it is safer to start there for the first 30 minutes to set the skin, then drop to about 325F, or the marrow-rich stuffing will scorch at the neck end before the thighs are done.
- Buttered paperA sheet of parchment brushed with butter, laid directly on the breast. It does the work of foil without steaming the skin. Remove it near the end, as directed, for the flouring and final basting.
- Stuffing temperatureThe dense chestnut-and-marrow mixture heats more slowly than a bread stuffing. Both the thigh and the centre of the stuffing need to reach 165F; the breast will read 165F somewhat earlier. Stuff loosely, and stuff immediately before roasting, not the night before.
- FrothingDredging with flour and basting with butter at the end is the old technique called frothing — the flour absorbs the fat and blisters into a crisp golden coat. Use a fine sieve and a light hand; a heavy dusting turns pasty.
- The three accompanimentsChestnut sauce, brown gravy and bread sauce are all assumed known. Chestnut sauce here is puréed chestnut let down with stock; bread sauce is milk infused with onion and clove, thickened with fresh crumbs. Both can be made a day ahead.
- YieldA 14 lb bird with this stuffing serves 10 to 12.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms at the moment when the American hotel kitchen was still working almost entirely in French, and this bird shows it: the marrow in the stuffing is often associated with French practice, though it was common in English cookery too, while bread sauce beside it is unmistakably English. Chestnut stuffing for turkey was already long established on both sides of the Atlantic by 1896, when Oscar's book appeared, and it clung to the holiday table partly because chestnuts were cheap and abundant — the American chestnut still dominated eastern forests. The blight that effectively erased that tree arrived only a few years later, after 1904, which is why the chestnuts a modern cook buys are almost certainly European or Asian. Frothing, the flour-and-butter finish that gives the last paragraph its odd sequence of instructions, belongs to an older spit-roasting tradition.