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Couronne, Palma
Prepare a risotto. Dress it on a hot, round dish in crown form and keep warm. Finely mince all the meat of the turkey from yesterday. Heat in a small frying pan one tablespoon melted butter; add one minced green pepper, half minced white onion and six small, well-peeled and cleaned, fresh, sliced mushrooms. Mix all well together and gently cook for five minutes, lightly mixing occasionally. Add the turkey and three medium, fresh, ripe crushed tomatoes. Season with two saltspoons salt, one saltspoons white pepper and half teaspoon sugar. Mix well, then add a gill hot tomato sauce, lightly mix again and briskly cook for ten minutes. Pour the preparation in the centre of the dish of the risotto and serve.
A leftover-turkey dish built on a ring of risotto. The only real technique here is the shaping, and the only real risk is overcooking meat that is already cooked.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning comes to about half a teaspoon of salt and a quarter teaspoon of white pepper. A gill is half a cup of tomato sauce.
- The turkey goes in last and brieflyThe bird is already roasted. Ten minutes of brisk cooking is for reducing the tomato, not for cooking the meat; if the pan looks dry before then, pull it off rather than letting the turkey shred into strings.
- Shaping the crownPack the hot risotto into a buttered ring mould and invert onto a warmed round platter, or spoon it into a ring by hand and smooth the walls with a wet spoon. It must be stiff enough to hold, so a firmer risotto than you would serve on its own works better.
- Risotto quantityThe recipe assumes you know what you are doing with the rice. Around 1 1/2 cups of arborio or carnaroli, roughly a quart of stock, will build a crown for four.
- "Tomato sauce"In a book of this vintage this means a plain cooked tomato sauce or a light sauce tomate, not a seasoned pasta sauce. Passata or a simple reduced tomato purée is the closest equivalent; taste before adding the full half teaspoon of sugar, since modern canned tomato is often sweeter.
- Green pepperOne whole minced bell pepper against six mushrooms and three tomatoes is assertive. If you want the turkey forward, use half.
- Yield and timingServes four as a main. Have the risotto finished and mounded first, then make the ragout, which takes under twenty minutes start to finish; risotto stiffens fast and does not wait well.
This is a next-day dish, and the recipe says so outright: "all the meat of the turkey from yesterday." Cookbooks of this sort took leftovers seriously, and a roast bird might reappear in a different national costume rather than as a plate of cold slices. Here the costume is Italian — couronne is simply French for crown, the shape the risotto is pressed into, with the garnish heaped in the well at the centre. The ring-of-rice-with-something-in-the-middle presentation was a familiar one, turning up under names like riz en couronne and bordure de riz; border moulds were common kitchen equipment. The pairing of green pepper, onion, mushroom and tomato with poultry reads more American than Italian.