The turkey.(Books about antiques)

The turkey comes into its own only when it emerges from the oven, brown, stuffed, and silent. Alive, the turkey has inspired strong opinions, few of them positive and none of them justifying a Thanksgiving turkey in the United States. In 1564 Charles Estienne wrote: "This bird is a regular oat bin, an abyss for foodstuffs, giving no more pleasure than clamour and fury when it is grown, or continual cheeping when it is young. Moreover, they are filthy and hideous to look at because of their deformed heads. The cock does not have a crest like our roosters, but in its place he has a red, fleshy growth, and under his chin a thick and long throat that inflates and turns different colours when he becomes enraged. While it is true that the meat of the turkey is delicate, it is also tasteless and difficult to digest.... There is more pleasure and goodness to be had in the meat of the peacock.... Doctors maintain that the turkeys egg can cause kidney stones and lead to leprosy."

This vitriolic assessment was written less than half a century after the first documented evidence of the turkeys presence in Europe. It is one of the many intriguing tidbits in this Festschrift compiled by Sabine Eiche, an art historian. Like finding a riveting book next to the one you were looking for, the author came across a reference to "a kind of Indian peacock" belonging to Cardinal Giovanni Salviati in Rome in 1531. This fact was reported to Francesco Maria I della Rovere, duke of Urbino, the subject of Eiche's research, by the duke's agent in Rome. The Indian peacock was, in fact, a turkey, and Eiche was off.

Like a good researcher, she deduces the introduction of the turkey to the tables of the French nobility in a bookish way by comparing the first and second editions of Francois Rabelais's Gargantua. She found that the colossal meals described in the first edition of 1534 did not include turkey, whereas in the 1542 edition turkey was on the menu at a feast that also included sixteen oxen, and six thousand pullets and pigeons.

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Among the extensive advice about how to prepare a turkey, Pope Pius V's cook decreed that in summer a turkey pullet be eviscerated and the cavity strewn with salt, fennel, and pepper before being filled with nettles "to prevent flies from entering and breeding." A seventeenth-century Italian cook emphasized the importance of larding the turkey before cooking so that "the meat was not unbearably dry and tough," advice that every modern cook should take to heart in ...