Sayeth Good King Wenceslaus, “Bring me flesh and bring me wine!” Well, I hate wine (though once in a while I’ll indulge my palate in a little Carlo Rossi Paisano), but flesh is another matter. Thus, I give you a tradition in the making—the Christmas Eve Father-Son Frankenturkey Roast. Credit for this idea goes to Max Watman, who advised me thusly: “Bone it out and trim some of the excess meat and use the dark meat and the excess to make a forcemeat with cornbread and country ham or sausage and some celery, carrot, onion, garlic, and sage. Take the forcemeat and put it in the turkey, sew it closed, and roast it.”
Sounds easy enough, no? Except, for starters, the “bone it out” part, which I confess was a baffling proposition. I started with the intuitive stuff: removing the plastic wrap and fishing out the giblets. Then I found another surprise in another dark, icy cavity: the neck, which looks rather like a sausage of inferior quality. My temporary sous-chef, i.e, my Old Man, suggested that we put it aside for soup. Who wouldn’t love some hot water that had that thing floating in it all day?
Rather than trim odds and ends from the inside of the bird, we amputated one drumstick, chopped up the meat, and added it to a bowl of giblets and Italian sausage. It was at this point that my sous-chef presented me with the first of several kitchen-related Christmas gifts: an heirloom meat grinder. Depending on which side of the family it’s from, it’s been used in the production of miles and miles of Italian or German sausage.
Speaking of which, you know how Otto von Bismarck said, maybe, that “[i]f you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made”? You can forget that, because as soon as I get this thing back to California it’s going to be all sausage, all the time. Just you wait.
I almost forgot: What you’re witnessing here is the production of “forcemeat.” There are several critical distinctions between forcemeat and stuffing, the most important one being that the former sounds vastly more sophisticated than the latter. The others I leave to you to suss out. The ingredients we used are as follows: ground-up stuff, onions, carrots, celery, walnuts, garlic, fresh sage, and large chunks of fresh ginger. The salt pictured below just happened to be there and is not necessary.
The deboning process was too complicated to document photographically, and it’s difficult to manipulate a camera with your hands coated in turkey matter. If you’d like to try it, I recommend this guy’s tutorial. Note that only the turkey’s main structure—ribs? shoulder blades?—comes out. Those creepy little arms and legs can stay right where they are. If you do it right, the turkey should go on resembling a turkey while being considerably flatter, like something from an early Warner Brothers cartoon.
What used to be full of useless bones can now be packed snugly with forcemeat. As Max clarified in a follow-up message, the forcemeat should be “halfway between a stuffing and a sausage. Like a boudin. . . . You want the whole thing—you’re putting it all back together?—to be pretty tight, like the bird has become a sausage.” And so it was.
And then we strapped it down, hooked it up to some electrodes, and waited for the lightning storm to take care of the rest.
It truly was a Christmas miracle—not only did the bird taste delicious, but it also saved our holiday dinner. You see, the real centerpiece of the meal was to have been a traditional pre-cooked Christmas ham. But someone who will remain nameless forgot to establish that the ham had, in fact, been pre-cooked. Were it not for this heavenly fowl, the Beck family might have dined on General Tso’s Double Disappointment. So that’s my good deed for the year.
