Home › The World's Kitchen › Tourte of Turkey, Helen
Tourte of Turkey, Helen
Carefully remove all meat from turkey left over from Thursday and cut it in small square pieces. Cut in same way an ounce cooked beef tongue, two ounces cooked lean ham and two canned French artichoke bottoms. Peel, wash, drain and finely slice six fresh mushrooms, place in a frying pan with a tablespoon melted butter, gently fry for five minutes, place in a vessel and add all the other articles. Pour in one and a half gills milk, a gill cream, tablespoon sherry, teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Grate a peeled, raw, well-washed potato and add to other articles, with two egg yolks, one teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, and mix well. Roll out on a floured table a half pound feuilletage to size of a pie plate, lightly butter plate, then line it with paste. Trim off at edges, pour preparation into plate, sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese over, set in a slow oven for forty-five minutes, remove, place plate on a dish and serve.
A leftover-turkey tart bound with a light custard, from the era when Thanksgiving carving left enough meat to plan a second dish around. Most of the work is in the measurements, which are pre-standardization.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of milk is 3/4 cup and a gill of cream is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: two saltspoons cayenne is 1/2 teaspoon, which is genuinely hot, and a saltspoon of nutmeg is 1/4 teaspoon.
- FeuilletagePuff pastry. Half a pound is roughly one sheet of frozen all-butter puff, thawed. The tart has no lid despite the name, so the shell carries the whole dish.
- The ovenA slow oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 250-325F. That is low for raw puff pastry in a wet filling, and forty-five minutes at that heat will leave the base pale. Blind baking the shell first, or starting hotter and dropping the heat once the pastry has set, addresses the problem the original ignores.
- The grated potatoThis is the hinge. Raw grated potato is the thickener that keeps the milk, cream and two yolks from weeping; it releases starch as it cooks. Grate it last and stir it straight in, or it will discolor.
- Artichoke bottomsCanned artichoke bottoms are still sold, usually in brine and often labeled French or Egyptian. Drain and pat dry before dicing. Frozen artichoke hearts are a workable substitute, though they carry more water.
- Cooked tongue and hamAn ounce of beef tongue is a garnish quantity, there for depth rather than bulk, and it can be left out without unbalancing the dish. The two ounces of lean ham matter more; use a firm cooked ham, not a wet deli slice.
- Custard donenessThe filling is set when the center barely trembles. Since the turkey, tongue and ham are already cooked, the timing is governed entirely by the eggs and the pastry.
- YieldOne pie plate, probably around 9 inches, though the original only says 'size of a pie plate'; serving four as a main course or six cut small. It is best eaten warm rather than hot, when the custard has firmed enough to slice cleanly.
Tourte is simply the French word for a round covered or open pie, and its appearance here signals the kitchen this book came out of: the Franco-American restaurant cooking of turn-of-the-century New York, where even a dish built from Thursday's carcass was given a French name and a woman's given name. Recipes titled with a first name alone fill this book. What is more revealing is the frugality underneath the French: the instruction to strip a holiday bird carefully, then dignify the scraps with a spoonful of sherry, two canned artichoke bottoms and a dusting of Parmesan. The grated raw potato as a binder is often said to be an older European trick, one reportedly common in forcemeats and puddings long before cornstarch was standard in American pantries.