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Minced Turkey, Creole
Prepare a Creole sauce and keep hot. Pick all the meat from the turkey left over from yesterday, slice it into very thin slices, then add to the Creole sauce. Season with two saltspoons salt and two saltspoons white pepper, adding a gill hot tomato sauce, lightly mix, cook for ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Pour into a hot dish and serve.
A leftover-turkey dish that depends almost entirely on a sauce the book expects you to have made already. Read it as: hot Creole sauce, thin slices of cooked turkey warmed through in it, ten minutes at a bare simmer.
- The hinge: the turkey is already cookedTen minutes is for heating and flavour exchange, not cooking. Keep the pan at a lazy simmer; a hard boil will shred the thin slices and squeeze them dry.
- "Minced" does not mean groundIn this period minced covered any fine cutting. The recipe says explicitly to slice the picked meat very thin, so use a knife rather than a processor, and keep dark and white meat separate if you want the dish to look deliberate.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. Here it is a supplementary half cup of tomato sauce loosening and reddening the Creole sauce.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two is half a teaspoon each of salt and white pepper. Salt at the end instead, since Creole sauce and tomato sauce are both already seasoned.
- Creole sauceThe recipe assumes you already have this made; the term in this period generally covers a tomato sauce built on onion and green pepper, often with celery, garlic, bay and a little cayenne. Any well-reduced tomato-and-pepper sauce of that character will do; judge the quantity by the amount of meat, enough to coat it generously.
- Reheating leftoversBring the mixture to a full 165F throughout, which the ten-minute simmer achieves comfortably. Turkey that has sat more than three or four days in the refrigerator should not go into it.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; it depends entirely on how much meat is left on the bird. Serve over steamed rice, or on buttered toast in the manner of the period; a hot dish means a warmed platter.
This is a second-day recipe, and the book is candid about it: the turkey is "left over from yesterday." Cookbooks of the early twentieth century devoted whole chapters to remakes of the roast, because a large bird was an expensive investment and a cook was judged partly on how little she wasted. Sending the remains through a Creole sauce reflects the period's habit of treating regional American cooking as a set of transferable flavour formulas: "Creole" on a hotel or cookbook menu is often said to have meant little more than tomato, onion, green pepper and a touch of cayenne rather than any particular New Orleans dish, and it was applied to eggs, fish, veal and leftovers alike. The doubling of tomato here, sauce plus more sauce, is a striking feature of the recipe, though the reason for it is not recorded.