Talking turkey | 1 December 2007

With the holidays approaching, foodies are grumbling again about turkey. The domesticated bird is overweight, too fat to fly; in cooking, turkeys easily dry out; their meat, especially the breast, is tasteless. Why bother? So I thought many years ago, when I served instead at Christmas a suckling pig, beautifully stretched out on the platter, paws forward, an apple in its mouth, skin golden-glazed, flesh succulent. My spouse accused me of culinary sadism, my son was driven to years of vegetarianism. The cooked bird is certainly inoffensive by contrast and — who knows? — perhaps therefore theologically more acceptable.

Still, there are steps you can take to make turkey more interesting without tarting it up with fancy sauces or stuffing; all it takes is time.

Don’t be misled at the butcher into thinking that the bird splayed out on the marble slab is ‘fresh’; most of these turkeys are in fact simply unfrozen, and you might as well buy the bird in the same state the butcher bought it.