No matter how you cook it – and I have one recipe that needs 32 items in the stuffing alone – a Christmas turkey will never be more than just fine
In his brilliant book of essays, The Man Who Ate Everything, the food writer Jeffrey Steingarten describes his adventures with turkey. Specifically, he describes his adventures with a recipe for turkey by Morton Thompson, a newspaperman of the 1930s who sometimes devoted his column to food. According to Steingarten, one November Thompson provided his readers with a turkey recipe so elaborate it passed into mythology, cooks speaking of it in such reverent tones it was as if they’d joined a cult. Down the decades, it was occasionally reprinted, and eventually reached Steingarten in a tattered article from a 1957 Gourmet and a quote from Robert Benchley, the humourist, which read: “Several years ago, I ate a turkey prepared and roasted by Morton Thompson. I didn’t eat the whole turkey, but that wasn’t my fault. There were outsiders present… I will just say that I decided at that time that Morton Thompson was the greatest man since [Brillat-]Savarin, and for all I know, Savarin wasn’t as good as Thompson.”
Naturally, Steingarten found all this irresistibly provocative, and he resolved to cook a bird à la Thompson. This is not a straightforward business. First, the cook must rustle up the stuffing – a byzantine combination of, among other things, breadcrumbs, veal, pork, butter, caraway seeds, poppy seeds, apples, orange, crushed tinned pineapple and preserved ginger – and sew it carefully into the bird, which is then browned in a very hot oven. Stage one is now complete (and the cook’s morning, given that the stuffing contains 32 ingredients). The bird is then painted with a paste of flour, egg and onion juice, dried in the oven, a process that is repeated over and over until it is safely sealed under a stiff crust. Finally, the turkey is roasted for five hours, during which time it must be basted every 15 minutes with a gravy made using giblets, liver and heart. Like some weedy patient in a hospital bed, it should also be rotated three times. At the end of all this, it will emerge from the oven as black as a witch’s hat.
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