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Scalloped Turkey
Cut off all the meat from a boiled or roasted turkey and mince it very fine. Crack and break the carcass, put it into a saucepan together with the fat, skin and gristle, cover it with cold water and let it simmer to make the gravy. Grease the inside of a piedish, cover the bottom with a layer of breadcrumbs, over this put a layer of minced turkey, on this lay bits of butter and any bits of stuffing, then a layer of breadcrumbs, and so on until all the minced turkey is used up. When all the goodness is extracted from the bones strain the gravy, pour it back into the saucepan and thicken the browned flour. Pour some of this gravy into the piedish and with the remainder of it moisten sufficient fine breadcrumbs to form a smooth paste over the top; season with a little salt and pepper and spread the moistened breadcrumbs evenly and rather thickly over the scallops. Lay a dish over all and bake it for half an hour; then remove the cover, and, when browned, serve.
A leftovers dish that builds its own sauce from the carcass, so the timeline matters more than the assembly. Start the stock first and everything else follows.
- Order of workThe carcass stock is the whole point of the dish and it needs a good head start. Break up the bones, cover with cold water and simmer 1½ to 2 hours before you begin layering; a 20-minute stock will give you thin, pale gravy and the casserole will bake dry.
- Browned flourThis meant flour toasted dry in a pan or a slow oven until nut-coloured, kept in a jar as a pantry staple. It thickens with about half the power of raw flour, so allow roughly 2 tablespoons per cup of stock. Toasting a few tablespoons in a dry skillet over medium heat, stirring constantly for 5-8 minutes, gives the same result.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for the covered half-hour, then uncovered for 10-15 minutes to brown the crumb top.
- "Lay a dish over all"An inverted plate or a second pie dish used as a lid to trap steam. Foil crimped over the rim does the same job, though it should not press onto the crumb crust.
- Pie dishA shallow, wide earthenware baking dish, not a pastry tin. Anything about 9 or 10 inches across and 2 inches deep works; the broad surface is what gives the browned crumb topping its proportion to the filling.
- MoistureThe recipe never says how much gravy goes into the dish, and this is where it fails most often. The layered meat and crumbs should be visibly wet, close to loose, before the top crust goes on, since dry breadcrumbs drink a surprising amount during baking.
- Mincing"Very fine" here means hand-chopped, not pulverised. A food processor turns cooked turkey to paste in seconds; pulse briefly or chop with a knife.
- Reheating leftoversCooked turkey that has been refrigerated should come back to 165F throughout. The covered half-hour at 350F will do it in a shallow dish, but a deep, cold-from-the-fridge casserole needs longer.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities and no size of bird. A carcass with reasonable pickings might give something in the region of 4 cups minced, enough for perhaps six as a main course, but this will vary widely with the turkey.
Scalloped dishes — meat or fish minced, layered with crumbs and a sauce, and baked with a crumb crust — were the standard American answer to the day after a roast, and they appear throughout nineteenth-century household manuals. The word is generally traced to the scallop shell, in which such mixtures were once baked and served individually. This version insists on making stock from the broken carcass rather than reaching for a bottled sauce: Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from 1893, and his book, published in 1896, moves freely between elaborate hotel service and thrifty domestic cookery of exactly this kind. Browned flour, called for here without explanation, was assumed knowledge at the time — it gave gravies colour and a toasted flavour without the long labour of a brown roux.