Let us consider the turkey, that curiously hyperbolic fowl that an uncommonly large number of us will be forced to consume tomorrow. Turkey is a creature that one either loves, or doesn't love, with only a very few left sitting on the proverbial fence. One of the greatest fan of the turkey was gastronome and chef Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who wrote in his landmark volume The Physiology of Taste that:
"When the vine-grower or ploughman wants a treat on some long winter evening, what do we see roasting over a bright fire in the kitchen where the table is laid? A turkey. When the hard-working artisan invites a few friends to enjoy a holiday which is all the more precious for being rare, what is sure to be the principal dish of the feast? A turkey, stuffed with sausages or Lyons chestnuts. And in the high places of gastronomy, at those select gatherings where politics are forced to give way to dissertations on taste, what do the guests hope for and long for as the second course? A truffled turkey!"
Brillat-Savarin obviously liked his turkey. On the other hand, William Connor, who wrote under the named "Cassandra" in the London Daily Mirror back in the '50s, was not much of a fan of the bird at all. He wrote:
"The turkey has practically no taste except a dry fibrous flavour reminiscent of warmed-up plaster of Paris and horsehair. The texture is like wet sawdust and the whole vast feathered swindle has the piquancy of a boiled mattress."
Myself, I agree more with the Brit than the Frenchman. More often than not, it is a dry thing, eaten with untoward haste so that we might return as quickly as possible to watching the 27 millionth rerun of Miracle on 34th Street. The whole Thanksgiving meal is a true oddity, for it is not so much savored as it is inhaled – 12 hours of cooking devoured in 12 minutes at the table. Years ago, I suggested to some friends that our Thanksgiving feast be eaten in courses, rather than in one trip to the trough. They regarded me with the sort of shock that might have been appropriate had I suggested we do our dining in pink tutus.
Still, there's no denying the undeniable historical solidity of the turkey. Despite New Yorker scribe Calvin Trillin's argument that we should be eating spaghetti carbonara to honor Thanksgiving, rather than this large, unwieldy, notably dumb bird, turkey seems to be with us to stay. And, turkey is about as native as anything we eat.
The bird was first introduced to the Old World by any number of Spanish conquistadors – either Miguel de Passamonte, Francisco de Cordoba, or Hernando Cortes, all of whom sent turkeys back to Spain from Mexico – where it was known as the "Rooster of the Jesuits."
The Aztecs who raised the bird called it a "peru," which is odd, for turkeys are not found in Peru. But then, they're not found in India either, which didn't keep the French from calling them the "Bird of India" – d'Inde, which metamorphosed into the word "dinde," French for "turkey." Both the Germans and Dutch also thought that turkeys came from India, calling them Calecutische Hahn and Kalkoen respectively. It was the English, fuzzy as ever concerning geography, who named the bird the "turkey," in much the same spirit that they turned Jerez into "sherry."
If old Ben Franklin had had his way, the turkey would be the national bird today, instead of the eagle, and probably rightly so. Though of course, there's a good chance then that someone would try to instigate a constitutional amendment making it a federal crime to eat a turkey. And don't forget to eat yours with fenberry sauce and misickquatash – far more colorful names than the latterday monikers of cranberry sauce and succotash.
– Merrill Shindler