No. 2041

Turkey Gobbler Stuffed with Chestnuts

Dindon Farci aux Marrons

The gobbler turkey is a large-sized bird having a medium convex shaped beak and is specially known by the erectile mammilated carnucle or fleshy membrane covering its head and extending over a part of the beak and neck. The turkey's tail is provided with fourteen distinct feathers that can be raised in such a manner as to form a semi-wheel. Its plumage is of a fine black or greenish color mingled with gray and white; they usually weigh from six to eighteen pounds. Draw, singe, pare, truss and remove the breastbone from a young gobbler turkey, the same as for roasting. Chop up ten ounces of kernel of veal and sixteen ounces of pig's leaf lard, both to be chopped separately then mixed together; season with salt and spice, adding a little shallot and the liver both well chopped. Put this into a mortar with a gill of stock (No. 194a), pound well, remove and place in a sautoir to cook for fifteen minutes, let cool and stir in sixty cooked chestnuts; stuff the turkey with this roast, dress and pour over a little good gravy (No. 404).

← No. 2040 Turkey Wings with Risot—Stuffed Turkey & Guinea Fowl No. 2042 Spring or Young Turkey, Puree of Artichokes— →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer opens with a page of turkey natural history before he gets to work; the recipe proper is a French forcemeat stuffing, cooked and cooled before it goes into the bird. That order matters more than anything else here.

Cook the forcemeat first, then cool itThe veal-and-fat mixture is sautéed for fifteen minutes and cooled before the chestnuts go in and the bird is filled. Stuffing a large turkey with warm meat forcemeat leaves the centre in the danger zone for hours; chill it thoroughly, and fill the cavity only just before roasting.
Kernel of vealThe "kernel" is the solid lean nut of the leg — what a butcher now calls veal cushion or top round. Ten ounces of any lean veal, trimmed of sinew, does the same job.
Pig's leaf lardLeaf lard here means the raw, unrendered leaf fat from around the kidneys, not the rendered white lard in a tub. Sixteen ounces of it to ten of veal is a fat-heavy forcemeat by design; fresh pork back fat or fatback is the closest substitute, and coarsely ground fatty pork shoulder is a workable modern stand-in.
A gill of stockHalf a cup. No. 194a is one of Ranhofer's numbered stock preparations; any well-reduced unsalted brown stock works.
"Season with salt and spice"Ranhofer's "spice" is a mixed spice rather than pepper alone. Figure roughly 1½ teaspoons salt per pound of forcemeat and a scant quarter-teaspoon of mixed spice.
Mortar and sautoirThe pounding in a mortar is to make the mixture homogeneous and slightly emulsified; short pulses in a food processor with the meat and fat well chilled do it faster. A sautoir is a straight-sided shallow pan, not a casserole dish.
Sixty chestnutsAbout 1¼ to 1½ pounds of peeled, cooked chestnuts. Vacuum-packed or jarred whole chestnuts are the practical option; fold them in whole so they stay recognisable rather than breaking down into the forcemeat.
Roasting, which the recipe omitsRanhofer treats the roasting as already covered ("the same as for roasting"). For a stuffed bird, 325°F is the modern standard, and both the thigh and the centre of the stuffing need to reach 165°F. Expect roughly 18 to 22 minutes per pound and check the stuffing temperature separately -- it lags behind the meat.
Yield and sauceA bird of this size with this much forcemeat serves 12 to 16. The "good gravy" of No. 404 is one of Ranhofer's numbered brown preparations; a reduced roasting-pan gravy built on the same brown stock serves the dish honestly.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its habit of prefacing a recipe with a paragraph of ornithology — beak shape, tail feathers, the fleshy caruncle on the head — belongs to the book's ambition to be a reference work as much as a cookbook. The dish itself is the standard French festive treatment, dindon farci aux marrons, in which an American bird is filled with a farce of veal and pork fat studded with chestnuts; chestnut stuffing is generally traced to the French and Italian kitchen, where the nut had long been a starch staple rather than a luxury. Ranhofer distinguishes the "gobbler" from the "spring or young turkey" of the following recipe.