How to Cook a Turkey

Rub the bird inside and out with salt and pepper.  In a stewpan put the
chopped gizzard and the neck and heart, to which add one bay leaf, one
teaspoon of paprika, a half teaspoon of coriander, a clove of garlic,
four cups of water, and salt to taste.  Let this simmer while you go ahead
with the dressing.

Dice the apple, one orange, in a bowl and add to this bowl a large can of
crushed pineapple, the grated rind of one half lemon, one can of drained
water chestnuts, three tablespoons of chopped, preserved ginger.

In another bowl put two teaspoons of Colman's mustard, two teaspoons of
caraway seed, three teaspoons of celery seed, two teaspoons of poppy seed,
two and a half teaspoons of oregano, one well-crushed large bay leaf, one
teaspoon black pepper, one half teaspoon of mace, four tablespoons of
well-chopped parsley, four or five finely minced cloves of garlic, four
cloves, minus the heads and well chopped, one half teaspoon of turmeric,
four large, well-chopped onions, six well-chopped stalks of celery, one half
teaspoon marjoram, one half teaspoon savory (summer savory if you can get
it), and one tablespoon of poultry seasoning.  Some like sage, some like
thyme.  Nobody, apparently, objects to poultry seasoning, which, ironically,
contains both.  Salt to taste.

In another bowl dump three packages of bread crumbs, bought at a bakery.
Add to this three quarters of a pound of ground veal and one quarter of a
pound of ground fresh pork and a quarter of a pound of butter and all the
fat (first rendered) you have been able to find and pry loose from the
turkey.  Mix in each bowl the contents of each bowl.  When each bowl is well
mixed, mix the three of them together.  And mix it well.  Mix it with your
hands.  Mix it until your forearms and wrists ache.  Then mix it some more.
Now toss it enough so that it isn't any longer a doughy mass.

Stuff your turkey, but not too full.  Pretty full, though.  Stuff the neck
and tie the end.  Skewer the bird.  Tie the strings.  Turn on your oven full
force and let it get red hot.  Put your bird on the drip pan, or, best of
all, breast down in a rack.  In a cup make a paste consisting of the yolks
of two eggs, a teaspoon of Colman's mustard, a clove of minced garlic, a
tablespoon of onion juice (run an onion through your chopper and catch the
juice), a half teaspoon of salt, two pinches of cayenne pepper, a teaspoon
of lemon juice, and enough sifted flour to make a stiff paste.  Take a
pastry brush or an ordinary big paintbrush and stand by.

Put your bird into the red-hot oven.  Let it brown all over.  Remove the
turkey.  Turn your oven down to 325 degrees.  Now, while the turkey is
sizzling hot, paint it completely all over with the paste.  Put it back in
the oven.  The paste will have set in a few minutes.  Drag it out again.
Paint every nook and cranny of it once more.  Put it back in the oven.  Keep
doing this until you haven't any more paste left.

To the giblet-neck-liver-heart gravy that has been simmering add one cup of
cider.  Don't let it cook any more.  Stir it well.  Keep it warm on top of
the oven.  This is your basting fluid.  Baste the bird every fifteen minutes!
That means you will baste it from twelve to fifteen times.  After the bird
has cooked about an hour and a half turn it on its stomach, back in the air,
and let it cook in that position until the last fifteen minutes, when you
restore it to its back again.  That is, unless you use a rack.  If you use a
rack don't turn it on its back until the last half hour.  It ought to cook
at least four hours and a half to five hours and a half.

When you remove it the turkey will be dead black.  You will think, "My God!
I have ruined it."  Be calm.  Take a tweezer and pry loose the paste coating.
It will come off readily.  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.

------------------------------

...  I always ran it just around Thanksgiving.  The first year that column
ran, it was received with broad grins.  All my readers thought I was kidding.
The second year a few tried it, the rest kept on grinning.  The third year
there were more converts.  About the time of the fourth year, the Domestic
Science Editor of the paper asked me if I wouldn't give a lecture on How to
Cook a Turkey before a group of women in the paper's auditorium.  Naturally,
feeling the way I feel about women and food, I said yes.  [This guy's
political views are a little incorrect.  He's a Republican, too.  --BH]
I was sorry later.  When I got on that damned rostrum and looked out at
those bright, merry faces all gathered to see a mere man make a jerk of
himself fooling around with stuff they felt belonged in a woman's province,
it was all I could do to keep from nancing out and just making a joke of the
whole thing.  But then I got kind of sore.  I was going to demonstrate a
simplified method.  I decided to snow them under.  And the complex way of
cooking a turkey is really something.  On the platform was a glistening
stove, a table with every known appliance.  There was a cupboard full of a
great many spices.  Not all the spices.  Just the ones a woman could
understand and accept.  The moral ones.  I started calling for things.
Each new thing I called for, the Domestic Science Editor would hand me, and
everything she handed me brought out a howl of delight from the women.
Finally I had the stuffing all made.  They subsided from their mad, Bacchic
laughter long enough to howl for the stuff to be passed around.  Wanted to
smell it and laugh some more, I guess.  I handed the bowl to the Domestic
Science gal and she gave it to a woman in the first row.  They started to
pass it around.  I went to work on the turkey.  Kind of a complicated deal,
fixing the bird to receive the dressing.  Halfway through I noticed the
place was kind of still.  I looked up and called for the bowl of stuffing.
It came up to the platform in perfect silence.  It was empty.  They'd eaten
it raw.

I quit fixing the turkey, said a few words about how to complete the job,
summed them all up in a stare, and went on out.  I'm not reciting a personal
triumph.  I'm recounting a feminine defeat.  They just didn't have anything
to say, and they weren't laughing any more.  They'd eaten that whole damned
bowlful of dressing raw.  I'm not saying that by the next day they hadn't
half of them squirmed virtuously out of it by deciding I was an immoral sort
of person even to know about such goings on and God help the daughter of any
woman who was allowed to go out with me.  And 40 per cent of the other half,
prodded, would admit that it was a nice enough dish, all right, but nobody
had time to spend on such heathen goings on and if I had to cook three meals
a day I'd soon find out.  This latter darkling saying is the defense women
have successfully opposed to fine cooking ever since they found they could
work on a man's pity and get away with it.

Anyway, next year a very decent percentage of those who read the "How to Cook
a Turkey" column actually tried it out.  It was reprinted in a booklet by a
publishing firm.  And subsequently Chryson's, a high-toned card and jewelry
establishment, bought the right to publish it as a holiday booklet.

The thing is, all this took five years.

------------------------------

    -- "Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player"  by Morton Thompson


Apparently he was a newspaper columnist.  The book is his memoirs, with
stories about his stories, published in 1945.  Craig Claiborne's version
is basically the same except that he uses the rind of a whole lemon,
uses ground cloves instead of telling you to grind your own, and adds
sage and thyme (and basil and chili powder) as well as the poultry
seasoning.  And he doesn't go through all that about how to roast the
turkey, just about how to make the stuffing.  And he thinks the title
of the book has "Wonderful" instead of "Wounded." :-)