This article is adapted from the November 23, 2024, edition of Gastro Obscura’s Favorite Things newsletter. You can sign up here.
I need to get something off my chest that has been bugging me for years: Turkey doesn’t get the respect it deserves (my colleague, Sam O’Brien, agrees with me here). For years, I feel the American public has been fed this lie that eating turkey for the holidays is a concession to tradition rather than something anyone enjoys. We roast a turkey out of a sense of familial duty, we’re told, but the mac n’ cheese, the mashed potatoes, the sweet potato casserole, those are for love.
Yes, it’s true that we’ve done a number of great injustices to this noble bird over the years, most crucially breeding the Broad Breasted White to monstrous, unsustainable proportions, but that should not besmirch the reputation of less inbred birds.
And yes, it’s true that turkey may not have been on the menu at the first Thanksgiving (most historians believe that other wildfowl were more likely candidates). But who cares? Virtually all of the dishes and much of the mythology of Thanksgiving were developed long after the Pilgrims. Even the current date was established centuries later by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who moved it earlier in November to extend the holiday shopping season.
Most people believe that dry turkey is an inevitable fact of life because 1) they personally had a bad one once 2) they’ve heard the phrase repeated so many times they believe it to be true—a sort of poultry Mandela Effect. Frustrated, I called up Eric Kim, a food journalist at the New York Times, who was tasked with coming up with this year’s turkey recipe for the publication.
“I don’t want to be too navel-gazey, but food media is an echo chamber and people keep publishing the same words because it’s a grind,” Kim says. “Over time, the narrative has become, no one really cares about the turkey. It’s always dry. That’s literally the copy you write before you introduce the side dish or whatever recipe you’re trying to sell.”
Kim, who has previously tackled Thanksgiving classics like stuffing and green bean casserole, acknowledges that he wasn’t initially thrilled when told it was his year to take on the bird. “It’s a rite of passage or a hazing,” he says. “But as a food writer at the New York Times, you have to take the turkey at least once in your career.”
For a recipe developer—or ambitious home cook—part of the frustration with this fowl is that there isn’t much room for innovation. Love it or hate it, the annual turkey is comforting in its sameness. It would taste better if you deep-fried it, but not everyone has the equipment or emotional fortitude. And it would be delicious if you confit the legs or even just spatchcocked it, but good luck explaining that to any relatives who relish the drama of tableside carving.
Despite how little room there is to reinvent the wheel here, plenty have come up with their own clever spins. “Alison Roman has a sheet-pan roast turkey, J. Kenji López-Alt has a mayo-roasted turkey, and then Samin Nosrat has a buttermilk-brined roast turkey,” Kim says. For his part, “the assignment was to make turkey exciting.”
To rediscover what made people so excited about turkeys in the first place, Kim looked back into history. Turkeys first made their way back to the European continent in the early 1500s, courtesy of Spanish explorers. These exotic birds were an immediate hit with the Renaissance upper crust—Catherine de’ Medici served 70 roast turkeys at a feast at her own coronation feast in 1549.
“You have turkey recipes that go back to the 1500s, where they were doing all kinds of weird stuff, like filling a pastry with turkey and having the head sticking out,” he says. And although turkey dinners are now synonymous with American culture, the concept of a large bird with mashed potatoes and gravy comes straight out of the English tradition of a Sunday roast. “That’s the culinary history of our Thanksgiving turkeys. It’s like a boomerang effect. The turkey came from America, then it was in England, then it bounced back to us.”
It was Swanson’s, though, that really solidified the image of a turkey dinner in most Americans’ minds. After Thanksgiving 1953 passed, the company was stuck with 260 tons of unsold frozen turkeys. Rather than dump the birds, they transformed them into the first frozen TV dinners, accompanied by sweet potatoes, cornbread stuffing, peas, and gravy, all on a partitioned aluminum tray.
“They sold so many of those because they were only 98 cents each,” Kim says. By the following year, 10 million turkey dinners wound up in American homes. “It wasn’t just the birth of the whole industry of TV dinners. I think it also really commercialized the turkey dinner itself.”
Growing up in Atlanta, Kim remembers turkey dinners being a staple of Southern-style buffets, although the concept has largely fallen by the wayside outside of one day a year. Being forced to cook multiple turkey dinners to develop his recipe—in July, no less—gave him a different level of appreciation for them.
A turkey dinner is an inherently communal affair, as well as a repudiation of food waste—one bird yields gravy, stock, and sides for days. “It really taught me about how, as Americans, we used to cook. It used to be about that turkey dinner, the Sunday roast,” he says. “I like being with the turkey that I’m going to roast and eat for a whole week. And that’s how it used to be. I want to remind people of that so that they can really appreciate the turkey more.”
Testing the recipes was not without its challenges. “I describe turkey as a dinosaur,” Kim says. “[It’s] very ligamented in a way that chicken is not. One thing that I just learned through this whole process was you really need to alter the meat.” Both dry and wet brines will change up the bird’s protein structure, and Kim spent months testing both. After months of testing, a dry brine won out, and Kim is particularly proud of the final recipe: Dry-Brined Thanksgiving Turkey With Chiles.
The inspiration for this turkey’s unconventional flavor profile actually came from an NYT reader, Niya Bajaj, a holistic yoga therapist who lives in Toronto. This particular bird comes with a South Asian-inflected spice rub made with dried mint, chiles, black peppercorns, and fennel or cumin seeds, then gets placed atop a bed of poblano, bell, shishito, and other fresh peppers. As it roasts, the vegetables caramelize and absorb the drippings, transforming into an easy side dish.
Kim likes the fact that the chiles are another New World ingredient that ventured around the globe, evolving as different cultures adapted them in their own ways. “Not only is the turkey American, but [so is] the capsicum annuum family of chile peppers, which includes paprika, cayenne, gochugaru, Aleppo pepper, chipotle, even the Thai bird’s eye chile that I’m calling for,” he says. “This one crop unites us. For the main ingredient in kimchi to have started in America, that’s beautiful.”
He hopes that it’s something readers will feel inspired to make outside of one holiday. “Time is the main ingredient,” Kim says. “What you end up with is really juicy, tender, fall-apart meat on the inside of that shellacked skin, almost like it was barbecued. It’s the texture of a rotisserie chicken. I love surprising people like that. Turkey can be this good.”
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