Roast Turkey
Dress and wash well, rub both the inside and outside with salt and pepper, and fill the body and breast with dressing, and with a cord tie a piece of clean, white muslin over the opening and tie a cord tightly around the neck; when ready for the oven take one-half pound of butter and mix with flour enough to make a paste and spread onehalf of it over the outside of the turkey, and when about half done spread on the other half; bake in a moderate oven, allowing twenty minutes to the pound; baste frequently; a covered pan is better, removing the cover just long enough to brown nicely. Stew the giblets in a saucepan; when done, chop fine, add the water in which they were boiled to the gravy of the roast turkey, also the chopped giblets, and thicken with flour.
A straightforward roast that assumes a wood or coal range with no thermostat and no thermometer. The method is sound; the timing and the stuffing are where it needs adjusting.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockTwenty minutes to the pound is the single most misleading line here — it would put a 14 lb bird in the oven for well over four hours and produce dry breast meat. Modern practice is roughly 13-15 minutes per pound unstuffed at 325F, with the thigh pulled at 175F and the thickest part of the breast at 165F.
- "A moderate oven"In books of this period the term is usually reckoned at somewhere around 350F, though the usage was never fixed. For a large bird 325F is better, since it gives the thighs time to finish before the breast overcooks.
- Stuffing the body and breastThe "breast" cavity is the neck pouch, which is why the recipe tells you to tie a cord around the neck. If you stuff the bird at all, the centre of the dressing must reach 165F, which usually means overcooking the meat around it. Baking the dressing in a separate dish is the reliable route.
- The muslinA clean cotton or linen cloth tied over the cavity opening was one way of closing a stuffed bird without skewers. Kitchen twine and a few turns around the legs does the same job; if you use cloth, unbleached cotton with no finish on it.
- The butter-and-flour pasteHalf a pound of butter worked with flour into a spreadable paste acts as a basting armour: it sets on the skin and slows moisture loss. It also slows browning, which may be why the second coat goes on halfway and the pan lid comes off at the end; the recipe does not say.
- Covered panA covered roaster steams as much as it roasts. Uncover for the last 30-45 minutes to dry and colour the skin, and expect the skin to be softer than an open-roasted bird's.
- GibletsHeart, gizzard and neck make good gravy stock; the liver can turn the gravy bitter and muddy, so cook it separately or leave it out. Simmer the rest 45-60 minutes, chop, and use the strained liquid to loosen the pan drippings.
- Resting and yieldThe recipe says nothing about either. Rest the bird 20-30 minutes under loose foil before carving. Figure about 1 lb of uncooked turkey per person, a little more if you want leftovers.
Turkey is a New World bird, domesticated in Mesoamerica and carried to Europe in the sixteenth century, and by the time this book appeared it had become fixed in American households as the centrepiece of Thanksgiving — a holiday given a national date by Lincoln's 1863 proclamation. What dates the recipe is not the bird but the equipment: with no oven thermometer and a firebox that had to be judged by hand, cooks relied on rules of thumb like twenty minutes to the pound and on protective coatings such as this butter-and-flour paste, a domesticated version of the barding with fat or paste-covered cloth that older English roasting practice used in front of an open fire. The instruction to tie muslin over the cavity belongs to the same world, where a length of clean cloth was as much a kitchen tool as a pan. Turning the giblet water into the gravy reflects a household economy in which nothing edible left the kitchen unused.