This past Thursday’s Thanksgiving saw a long-time dream of my family’s realized: We replaced our turkey with a turducken.
For anyone wondering what that is – trust me, it’s not hard to figure out – here is the father of the American turducken, John Madden, describing it on a Thanksgiving football broadcast in 2002:
“What it is, is a deboned chicken, stuffed inside a deboned duck, stuffed inside a deboned turkey.”
Simple, right? Well, for some reason Madden felt the need to tear the cooked birds apart with his hands on live TV, and from that day forward the legend of the turducken was born.
I don’t remember when the turducken became part of my family’s Thanksgiving lore, but I am pretty sure I never watched that game until now.
What I do remember is a story, told by my grandfather in a familiar fashion each year.
“Have I ever told you about the turducken?” I shake my head yes. “The chicken, stuffed inside of a duck, stuffed inside of a turkey?” Head still shaking yes. “Well, then, have you ever heard of an osturducken?” Give it a try – it’s surprisingly funny to list a progressively larger series of birds and imagine them being stuffed inside one another.
On top of that back and forth with my grandfather, there was a Mad TV skit, also memorialized on Youtube, that my cousin Patrick and I would retell every year at the dinner table, often more than once:
“John [Madden], are you alright?”
“No, Frank [Caliendo]. I ate the turducken.”
“Did you eat anything else?”
“Yes. Another turducken.”
I was not old enough at the time to understand why John Madden was a dedicated character on Mad TV (tearing into a turkey with his hands on live television probably played a part), but I was old enough to know it was funny. So we’d sit back at the Thanksgiving dinner table, waiting, until one or the other would say it – “God, am I full” – and just like that, we’d fall right back into the script.
“What’d you eat?”
“A turducken.”
“Anything else?”
“Another turducken.”
For over a decade, that hasn’t gotten the least bit old.
This year, having flirted with the idea for a while, my grandfather and I decided to pull the trigger. We would have turducken after all. I found a supplier/dealer/hook-up through Goldbelly and the stuffed and swollen turkey showed up at my parents’ house in Baltimore, frozen and waiting to be eaten.
We thawed it for three full days in the refrigerator, and then it spent all day in the oven. It smelled incredible, but having cooked a handful of roast chickens in the past year I can confidently say that the smell of roasting fat always smells good, regardless of the chef’s talent.
But the taste was genuinely great. The turkey was far juicier than the typical Thanksgiving fare, soaked through as it was with duck fat. The duck meat was conspicuously dark and delicious, and the chicken, while hard to discern between the two other birds, must have tasted good as well. The thick layer of sausage stuffing didn’t hurt, either.
So we indulged in a long-time dream, and hopefully the augmented animal will replace its more traditional brethren in future years to come.
One final thing before you get sick of this gobbling. The turducken has a surprisingly thorough Wikipedia page, for such an obscure holiday dish, and it turns out the turducken is only the beginning – that in 1807 a French chef created a “roast without equal,” making the simpler, three-bird variation look like Spam:
“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… The final bird is very small but large enough to just hold an olive.”
That’s a seventeen bird creation, for those who are interested. Means we might have to raise the bar next year.
The Queen’s Gambit
It’s been a while since a show like The Queen’s Gambit has conquered the cultural landscape so completely. Or maybe it hasn’t been that long, and things are really just starting to blend together.
In any event, if you ask someone whether they’ve watched anything good recently, I figure there’s at least a 75% chance they respond with The Queen’s Gambit. It’s taken over television.
Anne and I started it this past weekend, and are roughly halfway through. I am hooked. I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, so I’ll keep my comments to the following:
- Beth playing chess is one of the most intense 30 second stretches of television I’ve come across. It’s up there with Alex Honnold climbing El Capitan in Free Solo and those moments when someone tiptoes through a dark house in horror movies. I don’t know how the show’s creators do it, but they manage to turn chess into a high-intensity, high-stakes battle a few times each episode, and it works so well.
- Mrs. Wheatley is one of my favorite TV characters of all time. I’m not sure why, I just know.
Everyone who’s recommended the show to me has described it as very unique, and whether or not they all just read the same critic’s review of the show, I think that feels pretty accurate through episode four. I certainly recommend it.
Otherwise, I was off work all week, and did hardly any writing in that time. It’s sad to be done with my time off, but it feels good to be back in a routine. More to come on the writing front in the next few weeks.
– Emmett
Recent Posts:
Myers-Briggs Personality Test – I’m an INFJ-A, could anything be more obvious? (Blog, 5 min)
What I’m Reading:
Uncanny Valley – Anna Wiener, 2020
“This concentration of public pain was new to me, unsettling. I had never seen such a shameful juxtaposition of blatant suffering and affluent idealism. It was a well-publicized disparity, but one I had underestimated. As a New Yorker, I had thought I was prepared. I thought I’d seen it all. I felt humbled and naïve—and guilty, all the time.”
The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism – Zoe Beery, NYT 2020
“If money is power, then true wealth redistribution also means redistributing authority. Margi Dashevsky, who is 33 and lives in Alaska, gets guidance on her charitable giving from an advisory team of three women activists from Indigenous and Black power movements.”
What I’m Listening To:
Bill Gates – Armchair Expert w/ Dax Shepard
If you’re as successful as I am or any of those people are, you deserve rude, unfair, tough questions. The government deserves to have shots at you.”