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Thanksgiving is synonymous with turkey, 
of course -- a depressing fact no amount of boiling oil, salt water, or heritage breeding can disguise. Turkey is bad. Even as the self-appointed “majarajah of meat,” I find it impossible to work up any enthusiasm for this bland bird -- and I make a living from feigning fascination, especially during the holiday article-assigning season.
Nor can I say easily why turkey is such an unconquerably banal food. A moist piece of roast chicken remains one of the most perfect things the human race has ever learned to consume. But the turkey -- with the same crisp skin, succulent nether regions, and vast expanses of plump breast -- hardly inspires anybody. Where are the odes to the Bourbon Red or Jersey Buff to stand beside the panegyric literature inspired by the noble poulet de bresse? Where is the Colonel Sanders or General Tso of turkey? What caring mother turns to turkey soup as a panacea for childhood illness? Turkeys are sold year round, though generally in the form of icy cannonballs, the hardest and heaviest objects in the entire supermarket. But you can buy a fresh one at Whole Foods, or even a good market like Publix or Wegman’s. You can make soup with it, slow roast it with 40 cloves of garlic, smoke the wings. But no one does. And the reason is that turkey is bad.
One of Calvin Trillin’s applause lines over the last few years has been his suggestion, half-serious, that spaghetti carbonara replace the turkey as the official food of Thanksgiving. Carbonara, of course, is festive and nourishing, a party in a bowl. Turkey, contrarily, is magnificent in its presentation, a universal symbol of plenty. But once cut up it doesn’t look like anything. Few home chefs have it in their power to cut broad and even slices of white meat, to carefully separate out the legs and wings, and to first cook and then carve the difficult and fatty dark meat. As a result, the average turkey platter is just a pile of odd-shaped slices of meat, with a Henry VII meat scepter set on each side. A china boat filled with brown gravy attempts to cover up the essential flavorlessness of the meat, and sometimes succeeds; but it looks as amorphous and boring as the turkey itself.
So what is the solution? By now, most everyone who plans on cooking for Thanksgiving has bought their bird. The best solution is probably that of Paulie, who in a fit of rage yelled “!! Ya want the bird, go out in the alley an' eat the bird!” after throwing it out the door. But failing that, I would roast the turkey in two stages. Cook it to the exact moment when the breast meat is perfect, taking no thought for the dark. The juice will be running clear from pricks made in the flesh between the leg and the thigh, but the dark meat will still be undercooked. Make your presentation, and then slice the breast whole, taking care to keep the skin attached. Then serve that, as a kind of ready-to-carve roast, as a first turkey course, while the rest of the carcass, flipped upside down, cooks in a hot (450 degree) oven. When the second course, with its brown, sizzling skin and luscious thigh meat appears, it will be doubly welcome, and the abundance of grease will make people forget the essential insipidity of the white meat they’ve just eaten. It’s no more effective than frying or smoking at imparting flavor to turkey, just as the bacon in a club sandwich will always be better than the meat it attempts to enliven; but the crowd will be tricked into thinking they have eaten well, and the abundance of brown fatty skin, the only real repository of goodness in a turkey, will carry the day without a lot of work.
And then the next day, you can make turkey stock; perhaps in that rare elixir the secret to a tasty turkey, so long pursued, will be found at last.
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11-23-2005 @11:26PM Hawk said... I actually think chicken breast is worse than a whole turkey. Turkey's a severe comfort food - a chicken breast is enhanced with up to 25% Stuff That Isn't Chicken and sold en masse or flash frozen to be carted away in huge blocks that fit convieniently in the back of an SUV. BLEAH.
I was making some Balti Chicken and had to use chicken thighs, and suddenly discovered that the damn thing actually had flavor to it, as opposed to tasting nicely like nothing.
As for a turkey, well, I've never made a turkey before. Gotta do it once.
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11-24-2005 @12:49AM transiit said... Me, I'm a little different.
I start the bird in a hot oven (around 500 degrees) and eventually scale it back to 350. With a little aluminum foil, I mask off the white meat so it finishes around 160 and the dark meat finishes around 180.
I got that there idea from one of them persons on the television box! Yeehaw!
Your writing style, whether you intend to or not, suggests an air of elitism, easily betrayed by your disappointment in not having a "Colonel Sanders" or "General Tso" of turkey, but without the slightest hint of irony. I'm assuming this was an opinion piece, and not satire.
-transiit
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11-24-2005 @3:46AM jeshi said... Finally, someone who hates turkey as much as myself.
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11-24-2005 @1:07PM U said... I spent the summer in Turkey, and found, to my surprise, that turkey is becoming a very popular meat there. A huge number of turkey sausages are available; it seems to serve more-or-less as a pork substitute! I guess that it's low-fattiness is a major factor in its rise in popularity.
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11-24-2005 @4:12PM Josh said... I don't get you, transiit. Irony would have been required to be elitist. I like the Colonel and the General. You have me all wrong...
Josh
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12-07-2005 @5:36PM Schr?berg said... In response to the first comment, chicken has a crapload of flavor. At least, it does if it's at least a few months old and totally free-ranging, with no antibiotics and hormones. (As opposed to US factory-farm chickens, which have no flavor). Heck, chicken (that is, real chicken) is one of my favorite meats out there.
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