Modern Biscuits (left), Biscuits from the 1700s (right)
The last couple of weeks have been a complete whirlwind of writing and travel, which was challenging in a good way (the writing) and fun in a thank-God-for-a-break kind of way (the travel). But in my downtime, my brain was mush, so much so that I was sure any posts I wrote would be incoherent drivel. I missed blogging though! I was hoping to make a fun Thanksgiving dish for this week, like a Thompson’s Turkey.
In The Man Who Ate Everything, Jeffrey Steingarten tries to tackle this challenging, intimidating, and, I’m guessing, ultimately rewarding recipe. Steingarten says this turkey comes from Morton Thompson, a newspaperman who penned it for a food column in the mid-1930s.
The recipe is a whopping four pages long, and the bird is stuffed with a wild array of food, spices, and flavorings: an apple, an orange, crushed pineapple, lemon, water chestnuts, Colman’s mustard, caraway seed, celery seed, poppy seed, oregano, a bay leaf, black pepper, mace, parsley, garlic, turmeric, onions, celery, marjoram, savory (“Got me,” I say to anyone wondering what this is), poultry seasoning, bread crumbs, ground veal, and ground pork.
I never loved turkey – am I the only one who finds it dry and bland? – so I don’t actually want to eat Thompson’s Turkey. But I want to make it simply because the recipe writing is so much fun.
Continue Reading “America’s Oldest Residential Street and Biscuits from the 1700s”
