The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [203]
Thompson’s Turkey has become such a tradition in one branch of my wife’s family that the Nashville Banner ran a story twelve years ago about her cousin Bonnie Lloyd (the former Miss Utah); her husband, Bill; their six children, Ivey, Tiffany, Sheffy, Marty, Westy, and Merrilee; and their Thompson’s Turkey. It was Bill who first offered me a glimpse of Thompson’s Turkey with a torn and tattered article from a 1957 Gourmet magazine and a quote from Robert Benchley:
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 who ganged up on me.… 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 Morton Thompson.
To make a Thompson’s Turkey, you first mix up Thompson’s elaborate stuffing, sew it tightly into a very large turkey, and brown the bird briefly at a very high temperature. Then you paint it with a paste of flour, egg, and onion juice, dry it in the oven, and paint it again, repeating this until the bird is hermetically sealed under a stiff crust. You slowly roast the turkey for five hours, basting it every fifteen minutes. The bird emerges from the oven with a dead black surface from wing to wing. Why would you want to do all this to a turkey? I’ll let Morton Thompson explain:
Beneath this burnt, harmless, now worthless shell the bird will be golden and dark brown, succulent, giddy-making with wild aromas, crisp and crunchable and crackling. The meat beneath this crazing panorama of lip-wetting skin will be wet, juice will spurt from it in tiny fountains high as the handle of the fork plunged into it; the meat will be white, crammed with mocking flavor, delirious with things that rush over your palate and are drowned and gone as fast as you can swallow; cut a little of it with a spoon, it will spread on bread as eagerly and readily as soft wurst.
You do not have to be a carver to eat this turkey; speak harshly to it and it will fall apart.
This is the end of it. All but the dressing. No pen, unless it were filled with Thompson’s gravy, can describe Thompson’s dressing, and there is not paper enough in the world to contain the thoughts and adjectives it would set down, and not marble enough to serve for its monuments.
On the assumption that you will find these words no less seductive than I did, I will give you Thompson’s detailed recipe as soon as I have finished telling you about it; I have chosen the 1945 version, the one I slavishly followed, at least on the first attempt.
As the stuffing contains twenty-nine ingredients, it took me three hours to get the bird into the oven, and not only because my spice shelf had fallen out of alphabetical order; nearly every spice I possess found its place in Thompson’s stuffing. The completed mixture is reminiscent of no identifiable cuisine; it includes ingredients like crushed pineapple and canned water chestnuts that daring housewives of fifty years ago put into nearly everything they cooked. And it contains garlic, which was even too daring for most housewives fifty years ago when the American kitchen was still in the thrall of Anglo-German flavor phobias. Made with fresh herbs instead of Thompson’s dried, and with several ambiguities in the shopping list properly resolved, this is the most delicious bread stuffing I have ever tasted.
It’s a Fact
Q How strong is the scientifically ideal cooking pot?
A. One thousand newtons. If your pot isn’t stronger than 1,000 newtons, it will deform when you drop it. If it is stronger than 1,000 newtons, it will deform your foot when you drop it.
A turkey is the largest creature that most of us will ever cook, twenty pounds of muscle and bone and another five or so of stuffing. Thompson’s method asks for too much rotating of the turkey, which quickly becomes a hot, slippery,