Turducken is a dish consisting of a deboned duck stuffed into a deboned chicken, further stuffed into a deboned turkey. Outside North America it is known as a three-bird roast. [1] Gooducken is an English variant, [2] replacing turkey with goose.
The word turducken is a portmanteau combining turkey, duck, and chicken. The dish is a form of engastration, which is a recipe method in which one animal is stuffed inside the gastric passage of another—twofold in this instance. [3]
The thoracic cavity of the chicken/game hen and the rest of the gaps are stuffed, sometimes with a highly seasoned breadcrumb mixture or sausage meat, although some versions have a different stuffing for each bird. The result is a fairly solid layered poultry dish, suitable for cooking by braising, roasting, grilling, or barbecuing. [4]
The turducken was popularized in America by John Madden, who promoted the dish during NFL Thanksgiving Day games and, later, Monday Night Football broadcasts. [5] On one occasion, the commentator sawed through a turducken with his bare hand, live in the booth, to demonstrate the turducken's contents. [6] [7] Madden ate his first on-air turducken on December 1, 1996, during a game between the New Orleans Saints and St. Louis Rams at the Louisiana Superdome. [8]
Credit for the creation of the turducken is uncertain, though one of the first written mentions of a similar dish is found in the 1913 Spanish cookbook La Cocina Española Antigua by Emilia Pardo Bazan. On page 208, recipe 320 describes a dish called guisado particular which is made by first stuffing an olive, then a small bird with the olive, then that stuffed bird is stuffed into another larger bird and so on sixteen times more, then cooked in an open flame for 24 hours. [9]
It is generally agreed to have been introduced by Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme.[ citation needed ] Another claimant is Hebert's Specialty Meats in Maurice, Louisiana, whose owners Junior and Sammy Hebert say they created it in 1985 "when a local man brought his own birds to their shop and asked the brothers to create the medley". [10] A predecessor to both by decades however was New Orleans surgeon Dr. Gerald R. LaNasa, who was locally known for his use of a scalpel in deboning his three birds of choice and sometimes adding pork or veal roasts in the final hen's cavity, thus preserving the turducken tradition as a regional holiday favorite of the southern United States. Andouille sausage and Foie Gras were always key ingredients of LaNasa's creations. The results of Dr. LaNasa's work can be found in the modern day mass-produced turducken or turduckhen (another variation adding or substituting a cornish game hen). His turkey, duck, and chicken ballotine is now widely commercially available under multiple trademark names. Dr. LaNasa's innovation and success with ballotines, the Three Bird Roast, and turducken began mid-century, expanding in the 1960s and 70s long before many of the popular commercial Cajun/Creole chefs of today took the stage.[ citation needed ]
In the United Kingdom, a turducken is a type of ballotine called a "three-bird roast" or a "royal roast".[ citation needed ] The Pure Meat Company offered a five-bird roast (a goose, a turkey, a chicken, a pheasant, and a pigeon, stuffed with sausage), described as a modern revival of the traditional Yorkshire Christmas pie, in 1989; [11] [12] and a three-bird roast (a duck stuffed with chicken stuffed with a pigeon, with sage and apple stuffing) in 1990. [11] [12]
Gooducken is a goose stuffed with a duck, which is in turn stuffed with a chicken. [13]
In his 1807 Almanach des Gourmands, gastronomist Grimod de La Reynière presents his rôti sans pareil ("roast without equal")—a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an ortolan bunting and a garden warbler—although he states that, since similar roasts were produced by ancient Romans, the rôti sans pareil was not entirely novel. [12] [13] [14] The final bird is very small but large enough to just hold an olive; it also suggests that, unlike modern multi-bird roasts, there was no stuffing or other packing placed in between the birds.
An early form of the recipe was "Pandora's cushion", a goose stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a quail. [14]
Another version of the dish is credited to French diplomat and gourmand Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. The 1891 newspaper article French Legends Of The Table offers Quail à la Talleyrand: [15]
The following for instance, is Talleyrand's fanciful and somewhat roundabout way of roasting a quail. On a day of "inspiration gourmande" at his hotel in the Rue Saint-Florentin, Paris, he composed the following recipe: Take a plump quail, seasoned with truffles, and made tender by having been put into champagne. You put it carefully inside a young Bresse chicken; then sew up the opening, and put dabs of butter all over the chicken. Again, you put the chicken inside a fine Berri turkey, and roast the turkey very carefully before a bright fire. What will be the result? All the juice of the turkey is absorbed by the fowl, and all the juice of the fowl in its turn by the quail. After two hours roasting the fowl, which in reality is composed of three fowls, is ready, and you place the steaming trinity upon a dish of fine porcelain or chiseled silver. Then you pull the chicken out of the turkey, and the quail out of the chicken. The quail? Is it correct to talk of the quail, when this delicious, perfumed dish is indeed too good for any name? You take the quail as you would some sacred relic, and serve it hot, steaming, with its aroma of truffles, after having roasted it to a golden yellow by basting it diligently with the best Gournay butter.
In Hunan cuisine, the famed chef Liu Sanhe from Changsha invented a dish called sanceng taoji (Chinese :三层套鸡), meaning "three-layer set chicken", consisting of a sparrow inside a pigeon inside a hen, along with medicinal herbs such as Gastrodia elata and wolfberries. He originally devised the dish to alleviate Lu Diping's ill concubine of headaches. [16] The book Passion India: The Story of the Spanish Princess of Kapurthula [17] (p. 295) features a section that recounts a similar dish in India in the late 1800s:
Invited by Maharajah Ganga Singh to the most extraordinary of dinners, in the palace at Bikaner, when Anita asks her host for the recipe of such a succulent dish, he answers her seriously, "Prepare a whole camel, skinned and cleaned, put a goat inside it, and inside the goat a turkey and inside the turkey a chicken. Stuff the chicken with a grouse and inside that put a quail and finally inside that a sparrow. Then season it all well, place the camel in a hole in the ground and roast it.
Roasting is a cooking method that uses dry heat where hot air covers the food, cooking it evenly on all sides with temperatures of at least 150 °C (300 °F) from an open flame, oven, or other heat source. Roasting can enhance the flavor through caramelization and Maillard browning on the surface of the food. Roasting uses indirect, diffused heat, and is suitable for slower cooking of meat in a larger, whole piece. Meats and most root and bulb vegetables can be roasted. Any piece of meat, especially red meat, that has been cooked in this fashion is called a roast. Meats and vegetables prepared in this way are described as "roasted", e.g., roasted chicken or roasted squash.
Gravy is a sauce made from the juices of meats and vegetables that run naturally during cooking and often thickened with thickeners for added texture. The gravy may be further coloured and flavoured with gravy salt or gravy browning or bouillon cubes. Powders can be used as a substitute for natural meat or vegetable extracts. Canned and instant gravies are also available. Gravy is commonly served with roasts, meatloaf, rice, noodles, fries (chips), mashed potatoes, or biscuits.
A Sunday roast or roast dinner is a British dish, traditionally consumed on Sunday. It consists of roasted meat, roasted potatoes or mashed potatoes, and accompaniments such as Yorkshire pudding, stuffing, gravy, and may include condiments such as apple sauce, mint sauce, redcurrant sauce, mustard, cranberry or Horseradish sauce. A range of vegetables can be served, such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, parsnips, or peas, which can be boiled, steamed, or roasted alongside the meat and potatoes.
Stuffing, filling, or dressing is an edible mixture, often composed of herbs and a starch such as bread, used to fill a cavity in the preparation of another food item. Many foods may be stuffed, including poultry, seafood, and vegetables. As a cooking technique stuffing helps retain moisture, while the mixture itself serves to augment and absorb flavors during its preparation.
Roast chicken is chicken prepared as food by roasting whether in a home kitchen, over a fire, or with a rotisserie. Generally, the chicken is roasted with its own fat and juices by circulating the meat during roasting, and therefore, are usually cooked exposed to fire or heat with some type of rotary grill so that the circulation of these fats and juices is as efficient as possible. Roast chicken is a dish that appears in a wide variety of cuisines worldwide.
Porchetta is a savory, fatty, and moist boneless pork roast of Italian culinary tradition. The carcass is deboned and spitted or roasted traditionally over wood for at least eight hours, fat and skin still on. In some traditions, porchetta is stuffed with liver and wild fennel, although many versions do not involve stuffing. Porchetta is usually heavily salted and can be stuffed with garlic, rosemary, fennel, or other herbs, often wild. Porchetta has been selected by the Italian Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policy as a prodotto agroalimentare tradizionale (PAT), one of a list of traditional Italian foods held to have cultural relevance.
In cooking and gastronomy, duck or duckling is the meat of several species of bird in the family Anatidae, found in both fresh and salt water. Duck is eaten in many cuisines around the world. It is a high-fat, high-protein meat rich in iron. Duckling nominally comes from a juvenile animal, but may be simply a menu name.
The centerpiece of contemporary Thanksgiving in the United States is Thanksgiving dinner, a large meal generally centered on a large roasted turkey. Thanksgiving is the largest eating event in the United States as measured by retail sales of food and beverages and by estimates of individual food intake.
Picadillo is a traditional dish in many Latin American countries including Mexico and Cuba, as well as the Philippines. It is made with ground meat, tomatoes, and also raisins, olives, and other ingredients that vary by region. The name comes from the Spanish word picar, meaning "to mince".
A ballotine is traditionally a de-boned thigh and/or leg part of the chicken, duck or other poultry stuffed with forcemeat and other ingredients. It is tied to hold its shape and sometimes stitched up with a trussing needle. A ballotine is cooked by roasting, braising or poaching. A ballotine is often shaped like a sausage or re-formed to look like the leg, often with a cleaned piece of bone left in the end.
Roast goose is cooking goose meat using dry heat with hot air enveloping it evenly on all sides. Many varieties of roast goose appear in cuisines around the world, including Cantonese, European, and Middle Eastern cuisines. Roasting can enhance its flavor.
Stuffed peppers is a dish common in many cuisines. It consists of hollowed or halved bell peppers filled with any of a variety of fillings, often including meat, vegetables, cheese, rice, or sauce. The dish is usually assembled by filling the cavities of the peppers and then cooking.
Game pie is a form of meat pie featuring game. The dish dates from Roman times when the main ingredients were wild birds and animals such as partridge, pheasant, deer, and hare. The pies reached their most elaborate form in Victorian England, with complex recipes and specialized moulds and serving dishes. Modern versions are simpler but savoury combinations of rabbit, venison, pigeon, pheasant, and other commercially available game.
Turkey meat, commonly referred to as just turkey, is the meat from turkeys, typically domesticated turkeys, but also wild turkeys. It is a popular poultry dish, especially in North America and the United Kingdom, where it is traditionally consumed as part of culturally significant events such as Thanksgiving and Christmas respectively, as well as in standard cuisine.
Venetian cuisine, from the city of Venice, Italy, or more widely from the region of Veneto, has a centuries-long history and differs significantly from other cuisines of northern Italy, and of neighbouring Austria and of Slavic countries, despite sharing some commonalities.
Engastration is a cooking technique in which the remains of one animal are stuffed into another animal. The method supposedly originated during the Middle Ages. Among the dishes made using the method is turducken, which involves placing chicken meat within a duck carcass within a turkey. Some foods created using engastration have stuffing between each layer. The carcasses are normally deboned before being placed together.
In cooking and gastronomy, goose is the meat of several species of bird in the family Anatidae, which also includes ducks and swans. The family has a cosmopolitan distribution, and various wild species and domesticated breeds are used culinarily in multiple cuisines. There is evidence as early as 2500 BC of deliberate fattening of domesticated geese in Egypt.