The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [204]
My Thompson’s Turkey emerged as Thompson had said it would, a flat, ashen black. When cut into, it did not spurt fountains of juice; and the black coating did not readily peel off to expose acres of ultimate skin. But everything else that Thompson and Benchley said about Thompson’s Turkey is absolutely true. The meat of this turkey is the most flavorful and moist that you will ever taste, deeply imbued with the multitudinous perfumes of the stuffing, now mingled and compounded so that none asserts itself over the others. Everyone who has tasted Thompson’s Turkey agrees completely. It may be the only turkey worth consuming for gastronomic as well as symbolic reasons.
And this almost makes up for the fact that I was able to salvage no more than a few square centimeters of crispy skin from the entire turkey. But not quite. If Thompson himself were alive today, I’m sure he could expand upon his written instructions and set everything right. Cousins Bonnie and Bill, who have cooked Thompson’s Turkey ten or fifteen times, seem to have given up on getting a satisfying yield of skin from a Thompson’s. But I am not willing to compromise. Until somebody tells me how to cook a Thompson’s Turkey with perfect skin, I will rely on a more traditional method of roasting.
“No meat can be well roasted except on a spit turned by a jack, and before a steady clear fire—other methods are no better than baking,” wrote Mary Randolph in The Virginia House-wife (1824), surely one of the five best cookbooks ever published in this country. (Please buy yourself a copy from the University of South Carolina Press in Columbia; although the book is 168 years old, you can cook right out of it, and the recipes are wonderful.) Having enjoyed spitted birds and mammals turned over and before wood fires throughout northern Italy and parts of France, I know that Mrs. Randolph is correct, and as soon as I get a house with a fireplace, I will write a column about it every month until they stop me.
Just a year ago I bought a new electric Farberware Standard Smokeless Indoor Grill with Rotisserie (after prowling the flea markets in vain for a used Roto-Broiler, an electric rotisserie in a streamlined, chrome-plated cabinet that could be found in every suburban home when I was growing up), and I’ve achieved magnificent results with four-pound chickens and ducks, especially when I trussed them tightly and compactly and put them as near to the electric coils as I could (and in the case of ducks, pricked their skin all over to let the fat drain). Besides the transitory pleasure of having juicy and crispy birds for dinner anytime I wish, I see myself in training for the day when a real fireplace comes my way.
The Farberware booklet envisions cooking a turkey weighing up to seventeen pounds, and that is the size I tried, with the bird unstuffed and tightly trussed and a roasting time of five hours. Less than one of the five hours had passed when the turkey’s wing slipped from under its string and caught on the electric coil, preventing the bird from turning further. Thus fixed, the turkey began to brown rapidly and then to blacken along a stripe from neck to tail; the string holding the legs against the body burned through, and both legs plunged into the glowing coils. It was the stench of charring flesh and the billows of smoke that attracted my attention and drew me back into the kitchen, where for the next hour I struggled