Turducken anyone? No sleep for this cook

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November 25, 2009

By Karen Middleton The News Courier Wed Nov 25, 2009, 04:56 PM CST

ATHENS — The United States has always been known as the land of plenty and, growing out of that, the land of excess.

Given our tendency to super-size everything, perhaps our national bird should be the turducken rather than the bald eagle.

For the uninformed, which up until a few days ago, included me, a turducken is a chicken inside of a duck inside of turkey.

Since about 1985 turduckens have increasingly graced—or should we say bowed—Thanksgiving tables.

So I’m about 24 years too late in announcing this holiday delicacy. But then, I was the last one in the newsroom to get on Facebook, and I spend a lot of newsprint meandering through the past, so it figures that I would have been naively serving my family ordinary dry old turkey for a quarter century when they could have been enjoying this succulent dish.

I’ve heard that Paula Deen and Martha Stewart have shown how to cook this bird.

But I had to learn about turduckens from a younger contract worker, Leisl Stanford. Leisl’s irreverent sense of humor keeps the newsroom in a high state of mirth several days a month, so my first reaction was to tell her she was full of an unprintable substance.

She took this with her usual good humor, but to prove her point, she Googled turducken.

Still not convinced, I called Publix. Yup. They have turduckens. They’re a little pricey, but then you’re talking three birds in one.

And then you have to count man hours involved. I’m immediately thinking about the labor and upper body strength it would take to insert a chicken carcass up a duck carcass up a turkey carcass and thinking you would probably have to get your knee involved.

The whole process did not sound appetizing. So thinking there had to be an easier way, I followed Leisl’s lead and Googled turducken.

I learned that turducken preparation is no one-person operation. You start with a real sharp knife and partially de-bone this trio. Removing the spine, while not totally mangling the meat, is the object. This is why having a sharp knife is important.

Once you have these three all-but-flattened fowls laid out, then you begin wrapping one around the other, meanwhile tucking in a layer of cornbread-sausage stuffing with Cajun spices between each layer.

This is where you have to double-team. One person has to hold the edges of the severed spines together while the other person fastens them. And because the result is such a heavy, ungainly dish, it often requires looping a cord around the outer bird to hold it all in one piece.

It then takes 9-10 hours to roast the bird (birds). And it is recommended that you insert three meat thermometers.

Whew!

And to think for the past 40-plus years I’ve been going through something like martyrdom because I’ve had to get up at 5 a.m. on Thanksgiving mornings while everyone else was still asleep and stuff a turkey and get it in the oven so we could eat by early afternoon.

Turducken is a Cajun recipe best served with Zydeco music and chilled pinot grigio. We can blame the Cajuns for this ordeal. But it could be worse.

While surfing the Net for a turducken recipe, I happened on a recipe for “Stuffed Camel.”

In the cookbook, “International Cuisine,” presented by California Home Economics Teachers, 1983, you will find this recipe:

1 whole camel, medium size; 1 whole lamb, large size; 20 whole chickens, medium size; 60 eggs; 12 kilos rice; 2 kilos pine nuts; 2 kilos almonds; 1 kilo pistachio nuts; 110 gallons water; and 5 pounds black pepper. Serves 80-100.

Could this dish be called “Camlambken?” Whatever. Same drill; bigger drumsticks.

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Karen Middleton

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