Turducken (or. Slap Yo' Mama)

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:48 AM -0500 11/20/02, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>     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."

The only surprise is that Hesser's article doesn't mention John
Madden by name, the man who is probably most responsible for the
expansion of the lexical item to those of us outside the relevant
dialect area when he discusses the turducken during the annual
Thansgiving game in Detroit or Dallas on (now) Fox.

larry

>
>
>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. (...)