Turducken (or. Slap Yo' Mama)

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

    Surprise, surprise, surprise!  Today's NEW YORK TIMES has a Thanksgiving
food story about "turducken."  It's behind the ADS-L curve, of course, and
there's not even the slightest mention of "tofurkey" or "churkendoose."
However, there is one nice quotation in the story.  A Southern man said that
"turducken" is so fine it's "Good enough to make you go hime and slap your
mama."



Turkey Finds Its Inner Duck (and Chicken)

By AMANDA HESSER

NCE upon a time, possibly at a lodge in Wyoming, possibly at a butcher shop
in Maurice, La., or maybe even at a plantation in South Carolina, an
enterprising cook decided to take a boned chicken, a boned duck and a boned
turkey, stuff them one inside the other like Russian dolls, and roast them.
He called his masterpiece turducken.

In the years that followed its mysterious birth, turducken has become
something of a Southern specialty, a holiday feast with a beguiling allure.
There are some Cajun butchers, like Hebert's Specialty Meats, who have made
it their signature, stuffing dozens of turduckens each week, and shipping
them frozen around the nation. At Thanksgiving time, Hebert's production
leaps to nearly 5,000 a week.

"I think it's like the deep-fried turkey that came to the fore a few years
back," said John T. Edge, the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance in
Oxford, Miss. "It's a fairly exotic meal that has gone mainstream."

"When I visited my father in Macon, Ga.," Mr. Edge added, "he had a turducken
that he bought cut rate from Sam's Club in his freezer."

But since many people don't seem to mind dunking an entire turkey in boiling
oil, it doesn't seem so ambitious to try stuffing a duck stuffed with a
chicken into a turkey, rather than buying it prepared. It seemed
straightforward from a cooking point of view, and the results were
tantalizing.

A well-prepared turducken is a marvelous treat, a free-form poultry terrine
layered with flavorful stuffing and moistened with duck fat. (...)