Home › The World's Kitchen › Boned Turkey
Boned Turkey
Finely chop two pounds raw lean veal, the same quantity fresh fat pork, place in a mortar and sharply pound. Add two egg yolks, pound again, then rub through a wire sieve into a large earthen basin and keep on ice. Cut six ounces larding pork in half-inch-square pieces, plunge in boiling water two minutes, drain and keep on a plate to cool off.
Cut six ounces cooked smoked beef tongue in half-inch squares and four medium truffles in quarters. Scald and peel three ounces pistachios and add these four articles to the force in the bowl. Place in a saucepan six chopped shallots, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, six tarragon leaves, a quarter pint sherry. Let reduce on fire to half quantity, then let cool off. Strain through a cheesecloth into bowl, add a gill good rum, one and a half teaspoons salt, two saltspoons cayenne, one saltspoon grated nutmeg, two saltspoons mixed ground allspice and two tablespoons truffle liquor; thoroughly mix until well amalgamated and keep till required. Singe a tender turkey hen of about eight pounds, cut off neck, wings and legs. Split through back without separating and carefully bone without cutting skin. Cut away slices from breast and legs and place them where there is no meat, so as to have same thickness inside. Season with good teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Place force in centre of the cut side of turkey, fold to oblong shape, sew up, wrap in a strong cloth and tightly fasten both ends and the centre. Place in a braising pan with all bones from turkey, two calves' feet, two tablespoons salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cover with plenty cold water, place lid on and slowly boil two hours and forty-five minutes, being careful to skim off fat once in a while. Remove from pan, lay on a dish and let stand twenty minutes. Unwrap, wash cloth in cold water, tightly wrap galontine in same cloth, place between two boards, place a weight of six pounds on top and let stand until thoroughly cold. Unwrap, take off string, and the boned turkey is ready to use.
N. B. Always keep turkey enveloped in a cloth in ice box. Utilize the turkey broth for making jelly, etc.
This is a full galantine in the old professional style: a boned bird stuffed with veal-and-pork forcemeat, poached in its own bone stock, then pressed cold. Plan on two days, and read the whole thing before you start, because the boning has to be done in one piece.
- The hinge: skin integrityEverything depends on boning the turkey through the back without piercing the skin, because the skin is the casing that holds the forcemeat through nearly three hours of poaching. Work with a small sharp knife, keep the blade against the bone rather than the flesh, and patch any tear with a scrap of skin from the neck before you sew.
- "Slowly boil"Take this as a bare poach, 175-180F with the surface barely trembling. A true rolling boil swells the forcemeat, splits the skin and squeezes the fat out, leaving the slices dry and crumbly.
- DonenessThe two hours forty-five minutes assumes an 8 lb bird packed with roughly 5 lb of raw forcemeat and garnish. Check with an instant-read thermometer through the cloth into the centre of the roll: 165F is where you want it, and the long rest and cooling will carry it a little further.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne in the forcemeat is half a teaspoon and the nutmeg a quarter. The quarter pint of sherry is half a cup.
- Force, larding pork, truffle liquor"Force" is forcemeat. Larding pork is fresh unsmoked back fat or fatback, not bacon; if you use salt pork, the two-minute blanch matters more, not less. Truffle liquor is the juice from a tin of truffles, sold separately as truffle jus; the two tablespoons are for flavour, not thickening.
- Calves' feetThese are there for gelatin, so the cooking liquid sets into the jelly mentioned in the last line. Ask a butcher, or substitute 2 lb of split pork trotters. Without them the broth will be thinner and harder to set, even with the turkey bones in the pot.
- Food processor versus mortarPounding and sieving can be done in a processor, but work in short bursts with the veal, pork and yolks well chilled and the bowl cold. If the fat warms up, the mixture is liable to break and weep in the poaching.
- Pressing and yieldSix pounds of weight for eight or ten hours in the refrigerator is right; a couple of large cans on a board will do. The finished roll feeds 16 to 20 as a cold first course, sliced thin, and keeps about four days wrapped in the refrigerator. Note that the meat cooks to a pale grey-brown, not pink -- there is no cure in this forcemeat.
A galantine -- the book slips into the variant spelling "galontine" mid-recipe -- is a boned bird reassembled around a forcemeat, poached and served cold in slices, and it was one of the set pieces by which a chef of the period was judged. The name is generally traced to Old French galine, a hen, and the technique belongs to the cold larder or garde-manger, the station that produced the aspics, chaud-froids and mounted display pieces of the grand hotel buffet. Everything here points to that world: truffles by the piece and by the liquor, pistachios blanched and peeled, tongue diced for the mosaic pattern the slice reveals, calves' feet held back to make jelly for glazing. Turkey rather than capon or pheasant may well be an American touch, and the size of the bird tells you this was food for a table of twenty, not a family supper. The instruction to keep it wrapped in cloth in the ice box tells us the kitchen worked with ice, when a cold roll of meat under a damp cloth was itself a form of keeping.