Turducken  Turducken is a dish associated with Louisiana, consisting of a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck, further stuffed into a deboned turkey. Outside North America it is known as a three-bird roast.[1] Gooducken is an English variant,[2] replacing turkey with goose. The term turducken is a portmanteau of turkey, duck, and chicken. The dish is a form of engastration, which is a recipe method in which one animal is stuffed inside the gastric passage of another—twofold in this instance.[3] The thoracic cavity of the chicken/game hen and the rest of the gaps are stuffed, sometimes with a highly seasoned breadcrumb mixture or sausage meat, although some versions have a different stuffing for each bird. The result is a fairly solid layered poultry dish, suitable for cooking by braising, roasting, grilling, or barbecuing.[4] The turducken was popularized in America by John Madden, who promoted the dish during NFL Thanksgiving Day games and, later, Monday Night Football broadcasts.[5] On one occasion, the commentator sawed through a turducken with his bare hand, live in the booth, to demonstrate the turducken's contents.[6][7] Madden ate his first on-air turducken on December 1, 1996, during a game between the New Orleans Saints and St. Louis Rams at the Louisiana Superdome.[8] OriginCredit for the creation of the turducken is uncertain; other matryoshka-like stuffed dishes have existed for centuries, in a variety of cultures. One early version is found in the 1913 Spanish cookbook La Cocina Española Antigua by Emilia Pardo Bazan. On page 208, recipe 320 describes a dish called guisado particular which is made by first stuffing an olive, then a small bird with the olive, then that stuffed bird is stuffed into another larger bird and so on sixteen times more, then cooked in an open flame for 24 hours.[9] As a named dish, it is generally agreed to have been introduced by Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme. The earliest print reference to the dish is a 1982 Newsweek article that describes it as a new Prudhomme dish.[10] A 1983 New York Daily News article called the turducken "an example of his inventiveness."[11] In the 1960s, Prudhomme had worked as a chef at a series of resorts in Colorado and Wyoming. In 1984, Prudhomme told the Star Tribune that he had come up with the turducken in 1963 while preparing turkey for a Sunday brunch at one such resort. He said he had started selling turduckens in New Orleans around 1982, raising the price repeatedly to lower demand because of the day-long cooking process required.[12] Prudhomme trademarked "Turducken" in 1986.[13] In 2003, the food writer Jeffrey Steingarten investigated the dish's origin and concluded Prudhomme's was "the first, and therefore the authentic, recipe."[14] Another claimant is Hebert's Specialty Meats in Maurice, Louisiana, whose owners Widley Hebert Jr. and Sammy Hebert say they created it in 1985 "when a local man brought his own birds to their shop and asked the brothers to create the medley".[15][16] But Prudhomme's turducken had already been featured in media for several years before Hebert's opened in 1984.[17] In the United Kingdom, a turducken is a type of ballotine called a "three-bird roast" or a "royal roast".[18] The Pure Meat Company offered a five-bird roast (a goose, a turkey, a chicken, a pheasant, and a pigeon, stuffed with sausage), described as a modern revival of the traditional Yorkshire Christmas pie, in 1989;[19][20] and a three-bird roast (a duck stuffed with chicken stuffed with a pigeon, with sage and apple stuffing) in 1990.[19][20] Gooducken is a goose stuffed with a duck, which is in turn stuffed with a chicken.[21] Historical predecessorsIn his 1807 Almanach des Gourmands, gastronomist Grimod de La Reynière presents his rôti sans pareil ("roast without equal")—a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an ortolan bunting and a garden warbler—although he states that, since similar roasts were produced by ancient Romans, the rôti sans pareil was not entirely novel.[20][21][22] The final bird is very small but large enough to just hold an olive; it also suggests that, unlike modern multi-bird roasts, there was no stuffing or other packing placed in between the birds. An early form of the recipe was "Pandora's cushion", a goose stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a quail.[22] Another version of the dish is credited to French diplomat and gourmand Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. The 1891 newspaper article French Legends Of The Table offers Quail à la Talleyrand:[23]
In Hunan cuisine, the famed chef Liu Sanhe from Changsha invented a dish called sanceng taoji (Chinese: 三层套鸡), meaning "three-layer set chicken", consisting of a sparrow inside a pigeon inside a hen, along with medicinal herbs such as Gastrodia elata and wolfberries. He originally devised the dish to alleviate Lu Diping's ill concubine of headaches.[24] The book Passion India: The Story of the Spanish Princess of Kapurthula[25] (p. 295) features a section that recounts a similar dish in India in the late 1800s:
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References
External links Wikimedia Commons has media related to Turducken.  Look up turducken in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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