<< Front page Commentary November 21, 2003

Turkey basting made sleazy

Right now I am pretending that I’m a vegetarian. I am imagining that for the past fifteen leafy green years, neither bovine nor porcine product has ever once graced my fork. My vegetarian alter-awareness is now attempting to conjure an image more repulsive than meat.

I think I’ve realized what this ultimate gross-out must certainly be, this vegetarian’s pit of degradation: pale, dried out meat that tastes and crumbles like compacted sawdust. Turkey. Would it be possible for a meat to present a more daunting project? Maybe if it was just a huge gnarled horn of cartilage.

This coming week, many of us will go home to our families and take part in an anachronistic tradition whose politics and food both present significant problems.

I don’t know exactly when Thanksgiving began being referred to colloquially as “Turkey Day,” but whenever I see a “Happy Turkey Day” poster in the supermarket with a cartoon turkey wearing a little pilgrim’s hat, there is something inside of me that completely freaks out.

Besides the fact that many families have adopted other traditional meals for Thanksgiving (like vegetarian families and their hallowed Tofurky, which I’ve never tried but whose name I cannot even take seriously enough to make a joke about), it’s unfortunate that a food as ungracious as turkey has come to monopolize the image of Thanksgiving.

Regardless of how many families convert to tofu, or some less austere meat like lamb or pork, turkey is not going to fade from the scene. Something about its utter blandness has won our eternal solidarity.

We all know that sometimes you have to start your revolution from inside the system. Without completely subverting tradition, we have to take Thanksgiving by the gullet and shake it until it stops sucking so bad. The following turkey preparation is quite literally a revolution from the inside. It was relayed to me by my dear and trusted friend Gray Miles whose instructions, while sometimes challenging, are nothing if not reliable.

First, find a turkey farmer who sells direct from the farm. Before heading out to choose your bird, equip yourself with a bottle of cognac, preferably aged at least six and a half years and a large turkey baster. What you are going to do, in sum, is marinate the turkey from within by basting it via its ass with cognac, while it is still alive.

You have to explain this to the farmer and you will definitely need his or her help, so hit up the ATM on your way in case a little extra incentive is in order.

If you’ve ever drank a little too much of the Courvoisier you know that cognac makes for a difficult drunk and 25-pound turkeys are no different from you or I in this respect. Expect a bit of a struggle, but apparently the effect hits quick and the bird gives in after about the second go-round. The real work of this masterpiece is done during the ensuing couple of hours before the bird dies of alcohol poisoning.

The alcohol courses through its bloodstream and marinates it I daresay saturates it from within. Understandably, some might have qualms about this undertaking. All I have to say is, call me after you’ve visited the industrial turkey farm and watched how those birds are manipulated.

After your turkey has passed, have it plucked and dressed (or do it yourself). Stuff it with a mixture of dried apricots, quinoa, wild rice, chunks of custard apples, two heads of garlic, whole sage leaves on the branch and ground chorizo sausage. Rub the outside of the bird with butter, sea salt, fresh lime juice and the grease from the chorizo.

Gray suggests cooking it in a clay oven using slow-burning mesquite, but if your backyard isn’t equipped with one of those, the oven at 400 degrees for four to four and a half hours will work wonderfully.

If the recipe seems like something out of a John Waters film, consider by means of counterpoint my friend’s description of the ordeal’s yield:

“When I cut the beast open the smells were such as to suggest someone had cut open a hole into another dimension and let some wild, Dionysian spirits come cavorting into the realm of humans.”

If there’s something that Turkey Day could benefit from, it’s holes into another dimension or at the very least a moist piece of meat on the plate.

   

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