Home › Fragments › After Thanksgiving Dinner
After Thanksgiving Dinner
a most excellent hash may be made thus: Pick meat off turkey bones, shred it in small bits, add dressing and pieces of light biscuit cut up fine, mix together and put into dripping-pan, pour over any gravy that was left, add water to thoroughly moisten, but not enough to make it sloppy; place in a hot oven for twenty minutes, and, when eaten, all will agree that the turkey is better this time than it was at first; or warm the remnants of the turkey over after the style of escaloped oysters (first a layer of bread-crumbs, then minced turkey, and so on); or add an egg or two and make nice breakfast croquettes. The common error in heating over meats of all kinds is putting (406) into a cold skillet, and cooking a long time. This second cooking is more properly only heating, and should be quickly done. All such dishes should be served hot with some sort of tart jelly. Always save a can of currant juice (after filling jelly cups and glasses), from which to make jelly in the winter, and it will taste as fresh and delicious as when made in its season.
A leftovers recipe rather than a formula, and the ratios are left to the cook. What follows fills in the numbers the original assumes you already know.
- The point of the dishThe author's own emphasis is the one to keep: this is reheating, not cooking. Get the pan and oven hot before the turkey goes in, and pull it as soon as it is heated through. Long, slow rewarming is what makes reheated turkey dry and stringy.
- "A hot oven"The book gives no temperature; in a wood-range cookbook the term is usually read today as somewhere around 400-425F. Twenty minutes is the recipe's own timing, and a shallow pan may well be heated through sooner.
- Dripping-panThe shallow rectangular pan that sat under a roast, so a modern roasting pan or a 9x13 baking dish. Anything much deeper will steam the mixture instead of crisping the top.
- Light biscuitA soft raised biscuit, whether yeast-leavened or soda/baking-powder, not a hard cracker. Torn-up soft dinner rolls are the closest supermarket substitute; British-style biscuits or crackers will turn to paste.
- DressingPeriod stuffing was mostly bread, onion, butter and sage, cooked inside the bird. Any leftover bread stuffing works, and it carries most of the seasoning here, so taste before adding salt.
- Moisture"Thoroughly moisten, but not sloppy" means the mixture should hold together when pressed and show no free liquid in the pan. Leftover gravy first, then stock or water a few tablespoons at a time.
- The scalloped versionAlternate crumbs and minced turkey in a buttered dish, moisten each meat layer with gravy, finish with buttered crumbs, and bake in the same hot oven until the top browns, roughly twenty to twenty-five minutes.
- The croquettesOne or two eggs bind roughly a pound of minced turkey and crumbs. Chill the mixture firm before shaping, or it will burst in the fat.
- Reheating cooked poultryBring leftover turkey to 165F throughout, and do it once. Turkey that has already been cooled, reheated and cooled again is worth discarding.
- YieldNot stated, because it depends on the carcass. As a rule, the meat picked from one turkey frame plus leftover dressing feeds four to six as a main dish.
The "Fragments" chapters of nineteenth-century American cookbooks were not filler; they were the part of the book that assumed a household bought a whole bird and then answered to it for a week. The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the same family of compiled, subscription-sold domestic manuals as Buckeye Cookery, and shares its habit of treating thrift as a matter of skill rather than apology, hence the confident line that the turkey is better the second time. The closing note about saving a can of currant juice for winter jelly points to the same economy from the other direction: the fruit is preserved at its season so the tart jelly the writer insists on serving with reheated meat is on hand in December. Serving sharp fruit jelly with poultry and game is a long-standing English and American table convention, generally traced to the older practice of pairing rich or dry meats with a sour condiment in place of sauce.