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. Gooducken is an English variant, 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.

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."Turkey Finds Its Inner Duck (and Chicken)"
''The New York Times'', November 20, 2002. Accessed November 21, 2007

The turducken was popularized in America by John Madden, who promoted the dish during NFL Thanksgiving Day games and, later, ''Monday Night Football'' broadcasts."The Story of John Madden's Legendary Turducken"
USA Today, November 29, 2017. Accessed November 4, 2019 On one occasion, the commentator sawed through a turducken with his bare hand, live in the booth, to demonstrate the turducken's contents."PETA Gives Madden the Bird"
New York Post, November 28, 2002. Accessed November 29, 2019 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.

Origin

Credit 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.

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. A 1983 ''New York Daily News'' article called the turducken "an example of his inventiveness." 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. Prudhomme trademarked "Turducken" in 1986. In 2003, the food writer Jeffrey Steingarten investigated the dish's origin and concluded Prudhomme's was "the first, and therefore the authentic, recipe."

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". But Prudhomme's turducken had already been featured in media for several years before Hebert's opened in 1984.

In the United Kingdom, a turducken is a type of ballotine called a "three-bird roast" or a "royal roast". 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;Williams, Anne. "Send a friend a meal on wheels", The Sunday Times (London), December 2, 1990. and a three-bird roast (a duck stuffed with chicken stuffed with a pigeon, with sage and apple stuffing) in 1990.

''Gooducken'' is a goose stuffed with a duck, which is in turn stuffed with a chicken. TimesOnline.co.uk. Retrieved on June 2, 2008

Historical predecessors

In 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. 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.

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'':

In Hunan cuisine, the famed chef Liu Sanhe from Changsha invented a dish called ''sanceng taoji'' ( zh, 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.
The book ''Passion India: The Story of the Spanish Princess of Kapurthula''Moro, Javier (2006). ''Passion India: The Story of the Spanish Princess of Kapurthala''. Translated by Peter J. Hearn, First Circle Publishing, New Delhi, (p. 295) features a section that recounts a similar dish in India in the late 1800s:

See also

* Cockentrice – A dish consisting of a pig sewn to a chicken
* Cherpumple – A dessert inspired by Turducken
* List of duck dishes
*List of meat dishes
* Whole stuffed camel
*Matryoshka – Russia doll

References

External links

"Farm creates £665 multibird roast"
''BBC News''. December 30, 2007
"Turducken"

"Guisado particular"
''La Cocina Española Antigua''.

{{Chicken dishes

Louisiana cuisine
Poultry dishes
Stuffed dishes
American poultry dishes
Thanksgiving food
Christmas food