"I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character...the turkey is, in comparison, a much more respectable bird, and withal a true native original of America." - Ben Franklin
You've got a choice. You can do Thanksgiving at Uncle George's again this year - chow down with all the bickering relatives until you're stuffed enough to burst, then watch them all nod off over the football games. Fun.
Or, you can follow the lead of our Pilgrim forbears. They were on their own, a long way from home. They didn't really have a clue what they were doing. But they made the best of it, and at the end of the year they celebrated their independence - and survival - with a feast. Cranberries, and venison, and corn, and apples, and pumpkins - and turkey.
Turkey is easy, right? You just open the pack of cold cuts, pull out a handful, slap it between two slices of bread with a little mayo and lettuce, and you're ready to roll. Problem is, cold cuts don't cut it for Thanksgiving. No problem - you've always had the feeling that you could be a master chef. So you roll a twenty-pound bird through the checkout line and lug it back home (suddenly realizing just how heavy twenty pounds can be). And there it sits on the kitchen counter. Now what do you do?
Your first turkey could be a piece of cake, or it could be a total disaster. So we thought we'd seek out some professional help - Eric Trites, chief cook and pheasant plucker at the Hermitage Inn in Wilmington, Vermont. The Hermitage is a resort that specializes in the fare the pilgrim fathers (and mothers) laid on their tables: pheasants, wild turkeys, ducks, gamecocks, deer. And Trites figures he's cooked around five hundred turkeys over the past ten years.
"But not wild turkeys, not this year," he explains. "We had a little trouble with some foxes." As we talk, the CIA graduate (that's the Culinary Institute of America, for those of you who aren't gastronomically inclined) is washing and gutting a brace of pheasants and gamecocks, a fairly messy process.
"The good news for you is you don't have to do this," he adds with a laugh, rinsing some bits of bird from his fingers. "Your Butterball turkey, whatever, is fine. The only guts you'll have to look at are the giblets, and they usually put them inside the bird in a plastic bag."
Which leads to a little piece of advice on one of the primo errors, which victimizes even veterans of many Thanksgiving food-fests: "Before you start cooking, remove the little plastic bag with the giblets." It is, of course, not a major disaster if you forget this. It just makes the inside of the bird a little messy when the plastic bag starts to melt in the 325-degree oven...
"Actually," Trites notes, "the first thing you have to do depends on whether it's fresh or frozen. If it's frozen, you've gotta defrost it. The best way to do that is to leave it in the fridge, because turkeys are apt to spoil - as with all fowl. They have been known to have salmonella, which is not fun. Spending Thanksgiving day on the john is not a good time."
For the same reason, he says to bag the stuffing. "I would not cook a bird with a stuffing in it. The stuffing's going to sit inside and breed bacteria. And then, in order to get your internal temperature up to 185, 190 degrees, where you can kill the bacteria, the turkey is going to be cooked to death by the time you're done. So cook the turkey, and cook the stuffing separately."
Preparation is pretty basic. Trites recommends rubbing the bird down with some seasoning - pepper, thyme, and toss a couple of bay leaves into the cavity. You can also toss an onion, and maybe a stick of celery, in there to add to the flavor. You can also rub it down with a little oil or butter
Just like the Pilgrims, you probably won't have the right tools for this job. You want to cook your bird covered, so it doesn't dry out; your best bet for that is a full-size, covered, metal roasting pan. But if you don't have one, you can make do start with a large aluminum-foil roasting pan from the supermarket. Then, either cover the bird with an aluminum foil tent, or place the bird in a standard brown-paper grocery bag right in the pan (the moisture from the turkey keeps the bag from burning, while the bag hold the moisture in).
There are two schools of thought about placement of the bird, too. One school insists on starting with the breast down, so that as it cooks the juices pool in the breast meat and keep it tender; then, about 3/4 of the way through the cooking, you flip it over. Trites follows the other school, of "pop it in the oven and leave it alone." It's up to you which way to go - the advantages of maybe getting a moister meal may be outweighed by the problem of flipping over a heavy hunk of scalding hot meat.
Next step: Pop it in the oven. You want to cook it twenty minutes for every pound of turkey (so a twenty-pounder goes for more than six and a half hours!). This should give you plenty of time to put together the other parts of your Thanksgiving feast - make your stuffing, your gravy, your cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes - or run back to the supermarket and buy them. You can safely ignore the turkey for several hours.
"What you want to do," says Trites "is, in the last half hour of cooking, remove the cover and take some of the pan juices, spread them on the bird, and turn the heat up to about 350. That'll help the bird brown. If you have trouble getting your bird to brown, rub a little orange or lemon juice on it. That'll do it."
And then you just cook it 'til it's done.
How can you tell when that is? "Give it a poke in the thigh," Trites says. "If the juices run out kind of pinkish, it needs some more time. If they run clear, they've had it."
And before you carve it, you should let it sit for about a half hour. "When you heat a bird up, the juices kind of all get driven to the center. If you let it rest, the juices go back into the rest of the meat. It makes for a moister bird, that's all. Let 'em sit, and then start carving.
"They're a pretty simple bird to cook," Trites concludes. "You can't really go too far off. The worst that's going to happen to you is you're going to end up with dry turkey. Of course, that's why everyone serves 'em with gravy and cranberry sauce."