LJ Oracle

[mmcnealy]

Dear LJ Oracle,

Last night I posted about the Turduckhen and how it reminded me of a medieval or renaissance recipe where they stuff one bird inside of another.

If I remember right, it was a finch inside of a pigeon, inside of a chicken inside of something else. 

ornerie asked me where I saw this as it she wasn't familiar with it. 

Well guess what? I can't find it either, although I can see the words on the screen in my head.

So, dear LJ Oracle, can you find the recipe? 

Comments

[aeddie.livejournal.com]

The following appears in the 13th-century Arabo-

Andalusian _Manuscrito Anonimo_, and is reprinted in Cariadoc's

Collection, volume II:



Roast Calf, which was made for the Sayyid Abu-L-'Ala in Ceuta



Take a young, plump ram, skinned and cleaned; open it deeply between

the thighs and carefully take out all the entrails that are in its

belly. Then put in the interior a stuffed goose and into its belly a

stuffed hen and in the belly of the hen a stuffed pigeon and in the

belly of the pigeon a stuffed thrush and in the belly of this a small

bird, stuffed or fried, all this stuffed and sprinkled with the sauce

described for stuffing; sew up this opening and place the ram in a hot

tannur and leave it until it is browned and ready; sprinkle it with

that sauce and then place it in the body cavity of a calf which has

been prepared clean; sew it up and place it in the hot tannur and

leave it until it is done and browned; then take it out and present

it.

[edmndclotworthy.livejournal.com]

The version I've seen is

Boned swan
stuffed with a boned goose
stuffed with a boned capon
stuffed with a boned muscovy
stuffed with a boned duck
stuffed with a boned pheasant
stuffed with a boned partridge
stuffed with a boned woodcock
stuffed with a boned dove
stuffed with a boned snipe
stuffed with a boned sparrow
stuffed with a dozen larks' tongues

Unfortunately this is impractical for most of us in England as the hunting of swans remains a treasonable offence. (Seriously).

[aeddie.livejournal.com]

Besides, what are you going to do with all those tongue-less larks?

[mmcnealy.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this version.

I'd never have guessed that hunting swans was a treasonable offence in the UK, thanks for the interesting trivia.

[broider-barones.livejournal.com]

The wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turducken)entry is interesting but I doubt a couple of the comments. I'll look at my books and let you know what I find. I remember reading it, but....

[mad-duchess.livejournal.com]

Amusing, but not the recipe you're looking for...

http://www.twolumps.net/d/20061122.html

[mmcnealy.livejournal.com]

Yah, there's no gopher in this recipe that I remember... :D

[anjabeth.livejournal.com]

Not quite what you were looking for, but interestingly enough, I ran across this on Slate today:

From Why Stuffing Tells you more about the Cook than the Turkey, http://www.slate.com/id/2154254

In the only surviving classical cookbook, Apicius proposes stuffing sardines, squid, dormice, hares, and chickens. The book's recipe for gardener's-style pig, porcellum hortolanum, shows stuffing at its most byzantine: a pig's body stuffed with quenelles of chicken forcemeat, finely cut thrushes, fig-peckers, little pork sausages, lucanian sausage, stoned dates, edible bulbs, unshelled snails, mallows, leeks, beets, celery, cooked sprouts, coriander, whole pepper, nuts, eggs, and broth (and you thought turduckens were elaborate). Europeans, particularly the French, embraced the Roman idea of stuffing meat with meat, which led them to the most baroque examples of charcuterie: the galantine, in which a large piece of a boned-out animal—a boar's head, say, or a whole chicken—was stuffed with the meat paste known as forcemeat, then usually glazed with an opaque chaudfroid sauce. Along these lines, Escoffier, who published Le Guide Culinaire, the canonical guide to modern French cooking, in 1903, had a decidedly fancy approach to stuffed turkey. "Bone out the young turkey as for a galantine and stuff it with very good sausage meat mixed with ¼ dl brandy per 1 kg of sausage meat plus some large dice of ham or bacon and dice of raw truffle. Place a very small and very red ox tongue, wrapped in slices of salt pork fat in the centre of the stuffing." It seems the impulse to surprise the diner with a hidden treat is fundamental; at the risk of sounding crude, pretty much any animal cavity was, and still is, an invitation for the cook to fill it.