Turducken
Turducken is a dish associated with Louisiana, consisting of a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck, further stuffed into a deboned turkey. Outside North America it is known as a three-bird roast.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Gooducken is an English variant,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> replacing turkey with goose.
The term turducken is a portmanteau of 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.<ref name=engastration>Template:Cite web</ref>
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.<ref name="Turkey Finds Its Inner Duck (and Chicken)">"Turkey Finds Its Inner Duck (and Chicken)", The New York Times, November 20, 2002. Accessed November 21, 2007</ref>
The turducken was popularized in America by John Madden, who promoted the dish during NFL Thanksgiving Day games and, later, Monday Night Football broadcasts.<ref name = "The Story of John Madden's Legendary Turducken">"The Story of John Madden's Legendary Turducken" Template:Webarchive, USA Today, November 29, 2017. Accessed November 4, 2019</ref> On one occasion, the commentator sawed through a turducken with his bare hand, live in the booth, to demonstrate the turducken's contents.<ref name = "PETA Gives Madden the Bird">"PETA Gives Madden the Bird", New York Post, November 28, 2002. Accessed November 29, 2019</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Origin
Credit for the creation of the turducken is uncertain; other matryoshka-like stuffed dishes have existed for centuries, in a variety of cultures. One early version 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.<ref name=cocina-española>Template:Cite book</ref>
As a named dish, it is generally agreed to have been introduced by Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme. The earliest print reference to the dish is a 1982 Newsweek article that describes it as a new Prudhomme dish.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> A 1983 New York Daily News article called the turducken "an example of his inventiveness."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> In the 1960s, Prudhomme had worked as a chef at a series of resorts in Colorado and Wyoming. In 1984, Prudhomme told the Star Tribune that he had come up with the turducken in 1963 while preparing turkey for a Sunday brunch at one such resort. He said he had started selling turduckens in New Orleans around 1982, raising the price repeatedly to lower demand because of the day-long cooking process required.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Prudhomme trademarked "Turducken" in 1986.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> In 2003, the food writer Jeffrey Steingarten investigated the dish's origin and concluded Prudhomme's was "the first, and therefore the authentic, recipe."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Another claimant is Hebert's Specialty Meats in Maurice, Louisiana, whose owners Widley Hebert Jr. 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".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name=NationalGeographic>Template:Cite news</ref> But Prudhomme's turducken had already been featured in media for several years before Hebert's opened in 1984.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
In the United Kingdom, a turducken is a type of ballotine called a "three-bird roast" or a "royal roast".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> 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;<ref name=oxford-symposium>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name=sunday-times>Williams, Anne. "Send a friend a meal on wheels", The Sunday Times (London), December 2, 1990.</ref> and a three-bird roast (a duck stuffed with chicken stuffed with a pigeon, with sage and apple stuffing) in 1990.<ref name=oxford-symposium /><ref name=sunday-times />
Gooducken is a goose stuffed with a duck, which is in turn stuffed with a chicken.<ref name=TimesOnline>Template:Cite newsTemplate:Dead linkTemplate:Cbignore TimesOnline.co.uk. Retrieved on June 2, 2008</ref>
Historical predecessors
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.<ref name=sunday-times /><ref name=TimesOnline /><ref name=pandoras-cushion /> 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.<ref name=pandoras-cushion>Template:Cite web</ref>
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:<ref name=Talleyrand>Template:Cite news</ref>
In Hunan cuisine, the famed chef Liu Sanhe from Changsha invented a dish called sanceng taoji (Template:Lang-zh), 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.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The book Passion India: The Story of the Spanish Princess of Kapurthula<ref>Moro, Javier (2006). Passion India: The Story of the Spanish Princess of Kapurthala. Translated by Peter J. Hearn, First Circle Publishing, New Delhi, Template:ISBN</ref> (p. 295) features a section that recounts a similar dish in India in the late 1800s: Template:Blockquote
See also
- Cockentrice – A dish consisting of a pig sewn to a chicken
- Cherpumple – A dessert inspired by Turducken
- List of duck dishes
- List of meat dishes
- Whole stuffed camel
- Matryoshka – Russia doll
References
External links
Template:Commons category Template:Wiktionary
- "Farm creates £665 multibird roast". BBC News. December 30, 2007
- "Turducken".
- "Guisado particular". La Cocina Española Antigua.
Template:Cajun cuisine Template:English cuisine Template:Chicken dishes