Christmas: a time of excess, celebration and overindulgence. A time for eating and drinking, not out of thirst or hunger, but for the sheer pleasure of it all. A time to see a turkey and think, why stop there? Why confine myself to one type of bird, when I can, with some ingenuity or a good butcher, eat three types, five types – hell, even seventeen types, wrapped together in a portmanteau that would make even the staunchest of vegetarians stifle a smile?
Why not a turducken? It looks like a turkey, cooks like a turkey, yet carves like a terrine. A terrine of turkey, duck, the odd bit of herby sausage stuffing, and chicken. The late Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme claimed to have invented it in Louisana in the 1970s, but his authorship seems difficult to countenance when you consider that in eighteenth century France the palace chefs were stuffing seventeen birds into each other as a matter of routine. Chinese chefs often take a variety of birds and form them into one package for grand celebrations. Even us Brits were at it: great multi-bird roasts were the height of fashion amongst Tudor landowners, being edible proof of the wealth of the household and the estate’s thriving game population. The three or four bird roast made a regular appearance at the Victorian Christmas table – Queen Victoria was said to have been a fan – whilst in fifteenth century we were stitching the head and upper torso of a pig and rooster together to create the franken-feast that is the cockentrice.
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Turducken: the origins of the multi-bird roast