I wish you Turkey ....

I wish you, for your Thanksgiving turkey, one such as that eulogised by the American writer and humorist Irvin S Cobb (1876-1944) in Cobb’s Bill of Fare (1913).

First, he describes a turkey served at a large restaurant for a Thanksgiving feast – an ‘ancient and shabby ruin’ of a turkey, ‘full of mysterious laboratory products and … varnished over with a waterproof glaze or shellac, which rendered it durable without making it edible.

Then he tells it how a Thanksgiving turkey should be (and this is the one I wish for those of you celebrating the day):

“But there was a kind of turkey that they used to serve in those parts [‘up North’] on high state occasions. It was a turkey that in his younger days ranged wild in the woods and ate the mast. At the frosted coming of the fall they penned him up and fed him grain to put an edge of fat on his lean; and then fate descended upon him and he died the ordained death of his kind. But oh! the glorious resurrection when he reached the table! You sat with weapons poised and ready – a knife in the right hands, a fork in the left and a spoon handy – and looked upon him and watered at the mouth until you had riparian rights.
His breast had the vast brown fullness that you see in pictures of old Flemish friars. His legs were like rounded columns and undadorned, moreover, with those superfluous paper frills; and his tail was half as big as your hand and it protruded grandly, like the rudder of a treasure-ship, and had flanges of sizzled richness on it. Here was no pindling fowl that had taken the veil and lived a cloistered life; here was no wiredrawn and trained-down cross-country turkey, but a lusty giant of a bird that would have been a cassowary, probably, or an emu, if he had lived, his bosom a white mountain of lusciousness, his interior a Golconda and not a Golgotha. At the touch of steel his skin crinkled delicately and fell away; his tissues flaked off in tender strips; and from him arose a bouquet of smells more varied and more delectable than anything ever turned out by the justly celebrated Islands of Spice. It was a sin to cut him up and a crime to leave him be.
He had not been stuffed by a taxidermist or a curio collector, but by the master hand off one of those natural-born home cooks – stuffed with corn bread dressing that had oysters or chestnuts or pecans stirred into it until it was a veritable mine of goodness, and this stuffing had caught up and retained all the delectable drippings and essences of his being, and his flesh had the savor of the things upon which he had lived – the sweet acorns and beechnuts of the woods, the buttery goobers of the plowed furrows, the shattered corn of the horse yard.
Nor was he a turkey to be eaten by the mere slice. At least, nobody ever did eat him that way – you ate him by rods, poles, and perches, by townships and by sections – ate him from his neck to his hocks and back again, from his throat latch to his crupper, from centre to circumference, and from pit to dome, finding something better all the time; and when his frame was mainly denuded and loomed upon the platter like a scaffolding, you dug into his cadaver and found there small hidden joys and titbits.
You ate until the pressure of your waistband stopped your watch and your vest flew open like an engine-house door and your stomach was pushing you over on your back and sitting on you, and then you half closed your eyes and dreamed of cold-sliced turkey for supper, turkey hash for breakfast the next morning, and turkey soup made of his carcass later on. For each state of that turkey would be greater than the last.
There must still be such turkeys as this one somewhere. Somewhere in this broad and favoured land, untainted by notions of foreign cookery and unvisited by New York and Philadelphia people who insist on calling the waiter garçon, when his name is Gabe or Roscoe, there must be spots where a turkey is a turkey and not a cold-storage corpse. And this being the case, why don’t those places advertise, so that by the hundreds and thousands men who live in hotels might come from all over in the fall of the year and just naturally eat themselves to death?

And for the recipe for the day, a fine dressing.


Cornbread Dressing
(For one 10 to 12 lb turkey and one 1-qt casserole)
½ cup chopped onion, 1 ½ cups chopped celery, ¾ cups butter or margarine, melted, 1
pan corn bread, coarsely crumbled, 5 cups dry bread cubes, 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon pepper, 1 teaspoon poultry seasoning, 1 cup milk and 1 egg, beaten.
Lightly brown onion and celery in ¼ cup of the butter.
Combine corn bread, bread cubes and seasonings in large bowl. Add onion and celery to bread mixtures. Add milk, egg and remaining ½ cup butter, tossing lightly to combine. (Use an additional ¼ cup milk for a moister dressing.)
Lightly stuff about ¾ of dressing into body cavity and neck region of turkey.
Roast according to standard roasting directions.
Bake remaining dressing in uncovered 1-quart casserole during last 45 minutes
of roasting time.
From the News-Palladium (Michigan, nov 11, 1965)

Quotation for the Day.
May your stuffing be tasty
May your turkey plump,
May your potatoes and gravy
Have nary a lump.
May your yams be delicious
And your pies take the prize,
And may your Thanksgiving dinner
Stay off your thighs!
Anonymous.

Thanksgiving Food: Mock Turkey.

As the vegetarian reformist movement gathered force in the nineteenth century, cookbook writers turned their attention to the production of meatless meals that still paid familiar homage to tradition. A great deal of effort and evangelical zeal went into producing and promoting dishes that still looked vaguely like the “real thing” - begging the question of why a committed vegetarian would ever want something with a superficial resemblance to a dead animal on their place, regardless of its actual ingredients. Perhaps it helped the transition for those newly converted to vegetarianism, but it still seems a strange idea.

Before the usefulness of soy protein was recognised and promoted in the West (thanks in no small part to, of all people, the automobile entrepreneur Henry Ford in the 1930’s), the major substitute for animal meat was nut meat. The other thing that had to be factored into recipe adaptation by the vegetarian cook at this time was that most adherents and promoters also eschewed the use of condiments and spices of all sorts, including vinegar.

The author of a small cookery book Guide for Nut Cookery (published by the staunchly vegetarian Battle Creek organisation) in 1899, had this to say on the troublesome topic of a vegetarian Thanksgiving.

"The Thanksgiving dinner has been a great puzzler to the vegetarian housewife. “How can we ever celebrate Thanksgiving without a turkey?” has been a question which it has been hard to solve. I propose that we do have a turkey for Thanksgiving,- not the corpse of a bird whose life was sacrificed to satisfy our perverted appetites, but something which, although it looks like a real turkey, with neck, wings, legs, and even the drum-stick bones protruding, is only one made of nuts and grains. Then let us have the pumpkin pie, chicken croquettes, and fish all stuffed and baked, the salads, and lettuce,-in fact, all that Thanksgiving calls for; but we will use only wholesome material. We will substitute nut foods for the different meats, lemon-juice will take the place of vinegar, and nuts the place of animal fats. With painstaking, we shall have a better dinner than our sisters who have their platters ladened [sic] with the remains of a barn-yard fowl, and with cakes and pies filled with animal fats and spices. Besides this, we shall have a clearer mind, as well as a clear conscience; while those who eat meat are taking poisons into the system which benumb the brain, cloud the conscience, and render man unfit to meet the vesper hour and hold communion with his God."

And here is the author’s alternative Thanksgiving centerpiece – a gloriously time-consuming sculpture resembling a turkey, and named as a turkey – but without the turkey.

Roast Turkey.
To make a good-sized turkey, take 20 heaping tablespoonfuls of zwieola, 20 tablespoonfuls of No. 3 gluten, 8 tablespoonfuls of pecan meal, 8 tablespoonfuls of roasted almond meal, 8 tablespoonfuls of black walnut meal, 2 tablespoonfuls of peanut butter, 3 heaping teaspoonfuls of ground sage, 2 tablespoonfuls of grated onion, 2 teaspoonfuls of salt, 6 hard-boiled eggs, and 3 raw eggs. Put the zwieola in a large
pan and pour over it 5 cups of hot water, and let it soak for fifteen minutes ; then put the hard-boiled eggs through a sieve and add them to the zwieola ; add also the nut butter dissolved in water, beat the eggs and add them to the mixture with the other ingredients. Mix all very thoroughly ; if it is so dry_that it is crumbly, add more water, being careful not to get it too soft or it will not hold in shape well. A piece of sheet iron is nice to bake it on, as it can be more easily slipped off. Oil it with nut oil, and place on top of it a thick piece of muslin saturated with oil; upon this cloth form a turkey, making the breast full and high, and leaving a little piece for the neck. Press it together with the hands, oiling them with nut oil to keep them from sticking. Then
take a large tablespoonful of the mixture into one hand, and press into the center of it a large-sized stick of macaroni, which is long enough to protrude about two inches, after running the length of the leg ; with the hands oiled, shape it into the form of a turkey leg, using the white of an egg to make it stick to the body, and secure it by sticking pieces of macaroni through the leg, just below the bone, into the body,
carefully covering the end of the macaroni with a little of the mixture. Form the wings and attach them to the body in the same way in which the legs were secured. When the fowl is all formed and smooth, brush it over with a cloth dipped in nut oil, then bring up the cloth around the turkey and pin it together tight enough to hold the wings and legs in position. Then place in the oven and bake for an hour and a half. Remove from the oven, unpin the cloth, and with the shears cut off as much of it as possible without moving the turkey; spread the turkey with a mixture of beaten egg and roasted almond butter with a little salt added. Return to the oven and bake to a nice brown. Again remove from the oven and slide it into the platter on which it is to be served. The garnishing, in the cut, is cubes of cranberry jelly and parsley.

Postscript.
To see an example of a historic vegetarian Thanksgiving menu, featured in this blog in 2006, go here.

Quotation for the Day.
What we're really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?
Erma Bombeck.

Quotation for the Day.
What we're really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?
Erma Bombeck.

Thanksgiving Ideas for the Bride Housewife.

Thanksgiving is approaching over the Big Water, and I promised my American friends some historic menus and recipes. Those of you who are clearly on the wrong side of the Big Water need not worry, there are ideas aplenty for all of us amongst these gems.

I understand that the main delight (or not) of Thankgiving Day is to gather together as many family members as possible in order to enjoy (or not) a feeding experience and level of jollity similar to that of Christmas. I also understand that the household disruption, cooking, entertaining and cleaning up required by this event is somewhere on the scale between awesome and impossible. It may have been an easier task for our forebears, familiar as they were with much larger families living in much smaller communities, often with domestic help, and mercifully free of television and its celebrity chef standards.

Once upon a time a two-person household was a rare thing – a temporary circumstance until the new bride dutifully fulfilled her role and became a mother of many. The little advice that was around to help her cope with this hopefully very temporary state might be of particular interest today to modern cooks wishing to recreate historic recipes – often a frustrating task given the sheer quantities of ingredients involved.

Mrs. Wilson’s Cook Book, 1920, published in 1920 in the USA, noted the particular problem faced by the new wife at Thankgiving.

“The bride housewife who is planning a Thanksgiving dinner for “just the two” frequently finds herself in a dilemma. Turkey is much too large for her and chicken hardly appeals to her for this day.”

Mrs Wilson gave three “suggestive” menus for a Thanksgiving dinner for two. This one is my pick:

Shrimp Cocktail
Celery Olives
Roast Squab Duckling, Currant Jelly
Creamed Mashed Potatoes Peas
Lettuce Pimento Dressing
Mince Turnover Coffee
Cheese and Crackers
Nuts and Raisins.

Mrs Wilson kindly gave some useful basic recipes for two persons:


Pastry for Two.
Place in a mixing bowl
One cup of flour
One teaspoon of baking powder
One-half teaspoon of salt
Sift to mix, then rub in three tablespoons of shortening and mix to a dough with three tablespoons of water. Chop the water into the flour, then turn on the pastry board and roll out one-quarter inch thick. Use for tarts and turnovers. Brush with milk or syrup and water and bake in a moderate oven.


Cake for Two.
Place in a mixing bowl
Three-quarters cup of white corn syrup,
Yolk of one egg,
Four tablespoons of water,
1 cup of sifted flour,
Three level teaspoons of baking powder,
One level teaspoon of flavoring.
Beat to mix thoroughly and then add two tablespoons of melted shortening, folding in carefully. When thoroughly mixed, cut and fold the white of an egg into the dough.Turn into a well-greased and floured pan which has a tube in the centre and bake in a moderate oven for twenty-five minutes.

Quotation for the Day.

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.
Erma Bombeck.

Thanksgiving Pie No. 5

The final pie in the Thanksgiving series is mincemeat pie – the  pie which is equally appropriate for the Christmas season, which approaches with great haste.

Mincemeat pies were around for a long time before they were called mincemeat pies. Meat with fruit in pies goes back to medieval times, and there were many names for the end result (see the 15^th C recipe for Chewetys). It seems that the specific name ‘mincemeat’ referring to a mixture of minced meat, sugar, fruit, and spices is a late eighteenth or early nineteenth century phenomenon – but don’t quote me on that as I can hardly claim to have investigated it exhaustively! The OED gives the first known use in print as in 1824 in The Virginia Housewife, but I seem to remember seeing earlier uses - let me know if you know any, please!

Mixing meat (or in later times just suet) with sugar and dried fruit was a convenient way of pre-preparing rich pie fillings as the mixture would keep a very long time – an important attribute before canning and refrigeration. The dried fruit, sugar and spices were expensive imported items, and meat (and fat) was always prized, so the mix of “the goodly litter of the cupboard" was standard fare at any special occasion. We have long since lost the meat from mincemeat, but what remains still has a faint echo, if you listen carefully, of its medieval heritage.

The Vintage Christmas Recipes Archive contains a number of mince pie recipes dating from 1588, and includes mincemeat without meat, without intoxicants, with eggs, and with beets. In the link above is a recipe for Queensland Mince Meat (with mango), and elsewhere there is Mock Mince Pie and Eliza Acton's Mincemeat Pudding. There is always room for one more idea however, and the following is from ‘a married woman’ in 1847.

 

Mince Pie.

Parboil a beef's heart, or tongue, or a fresh piece of beef. When cold, chop very tine two pounds of the lean; chop as fine as possible, two pounds of the inside of beef's suet, and mix the meat and the suet together, adding a teaspoonful of salt. Take four pounds of pippin apples, pared, cored and chopped fine, two pounds of raisins stoned and chopped, and two pounds of currants, picked, washed and dried, and mix the fruit with the suet and meat. Add two pounds of powdered sugar, two grated nutmegs, half an ounce of powdered cinnamon, a quarter of an ounce of cloves, a quarter of an ounce of mace, and the grated peel and juice of two large oranges; and wet the whole with a quart of white wine, a quart of brandy, and a wineglass of rose-water, mixing them well together.
Make a paste, allowing for each pie eight ounces of butter and twelve ounces of sifted flour. Lay a sheet of paste all over a soup plate; fill it with mince meat, laying slips of citron on the top, in the proportion of half a pound for the entire mixture. Roll out a sheet of paste for the lid of the pie; put it on, and crimp the edges with a knife ; prick holes in the lid, and bake half an hour in a brisk oven.
Meat will keep good for pies, several months, if kept in a cool dry place, and prepared as follows. To a pound of meat chopped fine, and four ounces of suet, put an ounce of cinnamon, an ounce of mace, a quarter of an ounce of cloves, and two teaspoonfuls of salt, add, if liked, eight ounces of currants, eight of raisins, and four of citron. Add too, a tumbler of brandy or wine, three spoonfuls of molasses, and sugar enough to make it quite sweet. Put all in a stone pot, and cover it with a paper wet in brandy. In using it, take equal weights of meat and apples pared and chopped fine. If not seasoned enough, add to the taste. If the apples are not tart, put in lemon juice or cider.

The Improved Housewife, by A. L. Webster, A married lady (1847)

Quotation for the Day …

Thanksgiving is America's national chow-down feast, the one occasion each year when gluttony becomes a patriotic duty (in France, by contrast, there are three such days: Hier, Aujourd'hui and Demain).

[i.e Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow]
Michael Dresser

Thanksgiving Pie No.4

I have given myself a challenge today, with the topic of apple pie. A number of previous posts have discussed apple pie, so what is there left to say? But wait! We have had the famous (or infamous) Mock Apple made with crackers, Apple Pie with Whole Pippins (and orengado), Apple Pie with Potatoes, Onion Pye Made by Labouring Mens’ Wives (with apples), and Pork Apple Pie. What we have not had is simple, uncomplicated, apple-only pie.

The most important apple pie in early America was undoubtedly made from dried apples. Apples grew as well in New England as they did in Old England, and in a mere orchard-establishing while, the country was awash with the fruit. Luckily the apple is easily dried – a great bonus at a time of limited preserving methods. Barrels of dried apples were a staple provision aboard the wagons on the great Westward treck, so that even a migrating family could regularly enjoy out of season apple-pies.

The New American Gardener of 1828 explained the very simple method of drying the apples.

“Every body knows that the apples are peeled, cut into about eight pieces, the core taken out, and the pieces put in the sun till they become dry and tough. They are then put by in bags or boxes in a dry place. But the flesh of the apple does not change its nature in the drying; and, therefore, the finest, and not the coarsest apples should have all this trouble bestowed upon them.”

Mrs. Rundell in A New System of Domestic Cookery (1824) gives the oven-drying method.

Dried Apples.
Put them in a cool oven six or seven times, and flatten them by degrees, and gently, when soft enough to bear it. If the oven be too hot, they will waste; and at first it should be very cool.
The biffin, the minshul crab, or any tart apples, are the sorts for drying.

And now to prepare them for pie:

Dried Apple Pies.

Wash the apples in two or three waters, and put them to soak in rather more water than will cover them, as they absorb a great deal. After soaking an hour or two, put them into a preserving kettle with the same water, and with the thin peel of one or two lemons, chopped fine. Boil tender; when they rise, press them down, but do not stir them. When tender, add sugar, and boil fifteen or twenty minutes longer. Dried apples, soaked over night, are made tasteless, and are mashed up by being stirred. When cooked, stir in a little melted butter, some cinnamon, and powdered cloves. It is important that the apples should be of a tart kind. 
Jennie June's American Cookery Book. 1870.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Quotation for the Day …

The natural term of an apple-pie is but twelve hours. It reaches its highest state about one hour after it comes from the oven, and just before its natural heat has quite departed. But every hour afterward is a declension. And after it is one day old, it is thence-forward but the ghastly corpse of apple-pie.

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)

Thanksgiving Pie No. 3

It is the turn of cranberry pie today, in our Thanksgiving series. The cranberry is of course a major crop in the USA, and like the pumpkin, was used to advantage by the Native American Indians who shared their knowledge with the hungry, struggling early settlers, thereby assuring its place at the heart of Thanksgiving.

According to a gardeners’s manual of 1839, one cranberry plant requires two and a half square feet of land and will produce three and a half bushels of berries which will supply one hundred and forty pies. Even if modern horticultural methods have not increased the yield, that is an extraordinarily generous pie plant.

Living as I do in the nether part of the world, where fresh cranberries are as common as hen’s teeth and almost as expensive as fresh caviar, I am thoroughly entitled to be curious about cranberry pie. Most recipes give a cup for cup amount of sugar to berries. This is a jam proportion, is it not?  Is the filling of the finished pie/tart jammy (or it that jelly-y?)  I know that one year I will make it over the big water in time for Thanksgiving, and perhaps one of you will make me the real deal. I look forward to it.

In the meanwhile, only a gratuitious satisfaction of my curiosity is possible. It appears that cookbook writers over the years disagree as to whether the quintessential cranberry pie should be spiced or not, and the berries pre-cooked or not. There does seem to be consensus that cranberry pies are topless. In many parts of the world, a topless pie is a tart … but let me not start that debate again …

The extraordinarily versatile and prolific Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) who must be considered an expert, comes out clearly in favour of topless cranberry pies. In her famous book The American Frugal Housewife (1841) says of them:

“Cranberry pies need very little spice. A little nutmeg, or cinnamon, improves them. They need a great deal of sweetening. It is well to stew the sweetening with them ; at least a part of it. It is easy to add, if you find them too sour for your taste. When cranberries are strained, and added to about their own weight in sugar, they make very delicious tarts. No upper crust.”

I have chosen a recipe for you today from an Iowa newspaper, the Waterloo Courier, of Nov 24, 1880.

Cranberry Pie.

There are various ways to make a cranberry pie; some make it open like a custard or pumpkin pie. This is good, but not so good as to cover like an apple pie. Do not stew the berries, as some do before baking, but slit each berry with a knife. This will preserve the freshness of the fruit, which is quite an important thing. A cupful of berries aud an equal quantity of white sugar will make a medium-sized pie. .Those who like a sweet pie should have more sugar, also more berries if desired. 
Bake as usual. A little flour sifted over the fruit gives it a thicker consistence.
One thing should not be forgotten, add a small teacupful of water.

Do you, Oh Fresh Cranberry Pie Makers, really slit each and every berry individually before en-pastrying them? A great labour of love, that.

The cranberry is also, as I understand it, indispensible in the form of sauce for the turkey at Thanksgiving – no doubt an adaptation of the ancient indispensible currant sauce for various meats from the English tradition. I can buy it in a jar here in Oz, but it looks like breakfast jam. Maybe I will mortgage the house and buy some fresh berries to make it this year for our Christmas turkey. Please send me your best recipe for cranberry sauce from scratch.

Quotation for the Day …

It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.

Alistair Cooke.