Cheese-Stuffed Mushrooms

To the apparent surprise of Americans who believe conservative podcasters, Canada is a sovereign nation.

Cheddar-Stuffed Mushrooms 6 large portobello mushrooms, or 1 to 1½ pounds baby mushrooms ¼ cup (60 mL) butter, divided ¼ cup (60 mL) chopped roasted salted cashews (or nuts of your choice) 5 or 6 green onions 1 clove garlic (or more if desired), minced 2 tbsp (30 mL) flour 1 cup (250 mL) milk 1 cup shredded cheddar, or cheese of your choice 2 tbsp (30 mL) soy sauce 2 tbsp (30 mL) cooking oil Salt and pepper to taste Heat oven to 425°F or 220°C. Line a baking sheet with foil.* Remove the stems from the mushroom caps and chop. Set aside. Melt half the butter, mix with the chopped nuts. Set aside. Thinly slice the green onions, keeping the white and green parts separated. Set aside the green parts. Melt the remaining butter in a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the whites of the green onions and cook for 4 minutes, or until wilted. Stir in the garlic and chopped mushroom stems. Add salt and pepper to taste. Continue cooking 8-10 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and most of their juice has dried. Sprinkle the flour over the pan (if you have one of those miniature sifters, it's perfect for this), stirring rapidly to prevent lumps. While still quickly stirring, add the milk one splash at a time. You can add it more freely as the mixture thins out. After all the milk is added, cook until smooth and thickened, about 2 minutes. Then remove from heat, and immediately stir in the cheese and the green parts of the green onions. Mix the oil and soy sauce. Brush them all over the mushroom caps. Then lay the caps concave side up on the baking sheet. Fill them with the cheese sauce, adding enough to almost come to their rims. Put some of the chopped nuts and butter on top of each. Bake 20-25 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and the cheese is golden at the edges. Serve warm. *You don't need to line the pan with foil. But come cleanup time, you'll be glad you did. Adapted from Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Right after election night, I said that I hoped Trump's dumber policies would inconvenience enough people who have sufficient money to influence him, thus bringing at least a little sanity back into national politics. And already, we are seeing little ripples of dismay in various top-floor offices. I would be bitterly amused if I had a lot of money to throw away on rising prices.

Liquor store employees in Canada have been removing American alcohol from the shelves as shoppers carefully avoid it. It turns out that people get irked when threatened with annexation and whapped with tariffs. Canadians may not be able to vote in US elections, but they can definitely vote with their money.

A friend sent me this picture from a store in Montreal.

 

Sinking sales over the border haven't bred executive desperation yet, but there are already signs of consternation. After all, stores never let freshly-cleared shelf space stay vacant. The president of the Kentucky Distillers' Association took to Twitter and begged Canadians to keep buying bourbon. The distillers' plea came on the same day that the Liquor Control Board of Ontario yanked American alcohol from every single store in the province. Other Canadian provinces have followed suit. 

The Globe and Mail

All of this to say, today we are getting out that magazine I took home from Ottawa's airport, and making a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Or at least, we are trying to make a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. As we have learned, a lot of the recipes from their beautifully-photographed magazine seem like they were only tested in commercial kitchens. I suspect the LCBO's recipe developers didn't always think about the realities of cooking in a house that does not have a full complement of restaurant equipment.

On a minor cross-cultural cooking note, I'm surprised the recipe writers used volume instead of weight* when writing the metric measurements of ingredients like shredded cheese and flour. I thought that people in Canada (and everywhere else that isn't the US) had kitchen scales.

We begin the recipe by making puffed wild rice. It was surprisingly hard to find plain wild rice at the store. There were plenty of rice mixes that contained it, but only one store in town could sell us a bag of standalone wild rice.

My puffed wild rice tasted burnt. I threw it out and tried again, watching the pan a lot more carefully. But I got more burnt (yet puffy) wild rice. After two failures, I figured that I needed a better tutorial than a few recipe sentences. But when I looked online, everyone's Instagram-worthy pictures showed rice that was just as burnt as mine was. Maybe everyone has been burning their wild rice and trying to convince themselves that it has a "deliciously nutty flavor" as the recipe headnote claims.

Since my burnt rice looked just like everyone else's, I gamely put it into the spice grinder. After it was as pulverized as it would get, it had a lot of unnerving translucent crystals that looked like Plexiglas sawdust.

With a skeptical yet open mind, I tried some of our allegedly completed "wild rice crunch." It was like eating gravelly dirt. This stuff threatened to sand off my teeth. At this point, I went off-recipe and tried putting it in hot water to soften it-- you know, what people normally do with rice. I thought I could put a dab of the resulting paste into the bottom of each mushroom for that, um, earthy flavor. But the rice was just as gritty as ever. Since I don't like ending every meal with a visit to the dentist, I threw it out. 

Setting aside the failed wild rice, it was time to go nuts.

We're supposed to use pecans, but this isn't the most economical time of the year to purchase them. Instead, I helped myself to a quarter-cup of cashews from the household snack stash. I could have chopped them with a knife, but we already had the spice grinder out from our recent wild rice misadventures.

I mixed the nuts with the melted butter as directed. If the wild rice hadn't been so terrible after getting burnt and pulverized, it would have been here also. But even though the paste looks terrible, but it tasted really good. I could already tell it would be an amazing topping for what was to come.

The next part of the recipe involved the white parts of our green onions and a lot of butter. I don't usually cook green onions, so this felt a bit odd. But it smelled really good. We should have been using a leek, but those were very expensive and only sold in large bunches. I didn't want to commit to two pounds of leeks for the sake of one mushroom recipe.

We are next directed to add the chopped mushroom stems. I like that the recipe uses the whole mushroom instead of telling us to snap off the stems and then discard them.

I usually don't cook mushrooms until dry, but I followed the directions and kept stirring the frying pan until all of the juices had bubbled away. The mushroom reduction in the pan was fantastically good, but I don't know if it was worth it.

The next part of the recipe is easy if you can make a competent white sauce (which, admittedly, is tricky to get right on the first five attempts). After we have made gravy of the pan, it was time to add the cheese. The ingredients list calls for "old cheddar," but I chose to use up the various scraps of cheese lurking in the refrigerator. Besides, "five-cheese sauce" sounds so much better than "cheddar sauce."

 

One taste of the cheese sauce and I forgave the recipe writers for the burnt wild rice.

And so, it was finally time to assemble everything! The recipe calls for large portobello mushrooms, but full-sized ones were extremely costly compared to the little ones. I know nothing about fungiculture, but the price difference suggests that mushrooms are difficult to grow to a large size. So, I figured we would have dainty little stuffed mushrooms instead of big ones. And they looked so cute before we baked them.

I know that this magazine is meant for autumn recipes, but realistically we can only serve these on Halloween. They look like we should call them "zombie pustules."

Things didn't look any better after coming out of the oven.

Before I get too disappointed about their appearance, I should note that the magazine's army of photoshoot professionals couldn't make their mushrooms look any less oozy. Their picture is a lot prettier than what happened in our kitchen, but I think this is an inherently untidy recipe.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Even though our mushrooms looked like I had dropped them onto the floor before serving, I figured there was no way mushrooms and cheese could possibly taste bad. On a related note, I wonder if there's a visual equivalent of an "acquired taste." You know, how you think something looks ugly until spend several years forcefully convincing yourself that you like it.

These were as delicious as they weren't pretty. I know the recipe calls for pecans on top, but I thought the cashews were a lot better. That salty hit on top of the cheese made the mushrooms taste like really good bar food, without having to pay $20 for a beer in some place where the music is as loud as a high school dance. 

And so, once again, a recipe from this magazine didn't go where the directions told us to, but took us somewhere delicious. These mushrooms don't make up for the horror show that currently passes for national politics. But on the (very small) bright side, our northern neighbors who gave us the recipe aren't pretending any of this is normal.

*In the purest, most pedantic sense, it is true that the kilogram is a unit of mass, not a unit of weight. However, unless someone has decided to whip up some stuffed mushrooms while in a vomit comet or somewhere far away from Earth's surface, mass and weight are functionally interchangeable in the kitchen. Anyone wishing to waggle their irate index finger at me is advised to direct their corrective urges at the manufacturers of kitchen scales that switch between pounds (a unit of weight) and kilograms (a unit of mass) at the press of a button.↪

Italian Delight (featuring canned corn)

I was going to talk about how there's no way this could possibly be Italian. But the last time I did that, someone in the comments pointed out that the recipe in question was actually a pretty faithful copy of an actual recipe from Italy.

Italian Delight 8 oz shell macaroni 1 pound ground beef ¼ cup olive oil 1 large onion, finely chopped 1 clove garlic, pressed or finely chopped 1 green bell pepper, finely chopped 1 12-oz can tomato paste 1 16-oz can of corn, drained 1 can mushrooms (or 16 oz fresh sliced mushrooms) 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce ½ cup grated cheese (use a cheese that melts well) Cook the beef in a large frying pan. Then remove it from the pan, drain it, and set aside. Add the onion, garlic, bell pepper, mushrooms, and olive oil to the hot pan. Cook until the mushrooms are done. Then stir in the tomato paste and Worcestershire sauce. Add salt and pepper to taste. Stir in the meat, cover, and simmer. While the sauce is simmering, heat oven to 350° and cook the pasta in salted water. Drain the pasta and mix it with the sauce. Pour into a large casserole coated with cooking spray. Top with cheese and bake about 20 minutes. Mrs. Anna D. Wendt; 233 North Street, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; 16 August 1935; page 8

The Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, 16 August 1935, page 8

I'm fond of recipes from before people started worrying about "authenticity." Italian food crossed the Atlantic, got filtered through the grocery stores that didn't have half the ingredients, made its way to areas where no Italian-American person ever trod, and gave us recipes like this. It starts out with an all-American mound of beef.

So many older recipes with browning beef. If you had no idea what to cook on any given night, you only needed to put hamburger in a frying pan and then see where the contents of your refrigerator took you.

Mrs. Anna D. Wendt directs us to use a half-cup of olive oil-- which is a lot of oil for a single pan of food. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange printed the submitter's address under each recipe. (This will be relevant to the cooking oil very soon.) I'm always curious to see what sort of house begat any given recipe.  And so, as I can never resist doing, I looked up Mrs. Wendt's house on Google Street View. Mrs. Wendt's neighborhood is near the river that runs through town. Ignoring the appalling real estate prices of today, it looks like it was initially home to people who worked in the various warehouses and commercial docks on the water. 

This brings us to the excessive amount of oil that starts the recipe. Since I don't need to come up with enough calories to sustain a family working laborious jobs, I cut the oil in half. It still made a respectable slick in the pan.

Because I love modern conveniences as much as anyone else, I used frozen bell peppers and frozen onions. I could have properly weighed them out, but instead I eyeballed what looked like one onion and one bell pepper's worth of frozen vegetable confetti.

Our next ingredient caused problems: canned mushrooms. I usually like to follow recipes as written. After all, why bother with someone else's instructions if you intend to ignore them and cook as you always do? Also, as I have often said, following a recipe as written means I can blame someone else when things go bad. But I refused to ruin beef with canned mushrooms. They are bitter, slimy, and revolting. I try to keep an open mind and try things before I don't like them, but I refuse to touch canned mushrooms.

Things were looking good so far. The vegetables had exuded a lot of flavorful juices as they cooked- almost enough to turn this into a vegetable soup. It may look like I added water, but everything in the pan came from the vegetables cooked in it. 

I forgot to purchase fresh garlic, so I had to cheat a bit and use powdered garlic instead. When I stirred it in, the skillet exhaled the scent of the best garlic bread I can imagine.

And now we get to the tomatoes. You may think that spaghetti sauce made with canned tomato paste sounds (to put it delicately) inauthentic. But is canned paste really any worse than the pasty-pink out-of-season tomatoes you can purchase these days?

The taste of the sauce reminded me of the lasagna an ex-roommate's mom dropped off when we were in college. You could tell upon the first taste that it had been lovingly assembled from canned tomatoes with cheddar cheese on top. And while it was as "inauthentic" as you can expect such a creation to be, it really hit the spot after getting all our posessions up three flights of stairs.

 

At this point, we were ready to get out the most expensive part of this recipe: the beef. It was surprisingly hard to see after stirring it into the rest of our Mediterranean fantasy.

We were now one ingredient short of completing our Italian delight. Mrs. Wendt calls for a can of corn or peas. I choose to pretend she never mentioned canned peas. As the can of corn hovered over the pan of beef and tomatoes, I faltered. I tried to tell myself that corned spaghetti would be perfectly fine, if less than ideal. I told myself that this recipe, corn and all, got printed in the newspaper and won a $2 basket of groceries. I told myself that polenta is really commonplace in Italy, so corn is not an alien vegetable to them,and therefore this recipe is more plausible than it seems. I also told myself that this Italian delight came from someone's house, and not some corporate test kitchen trying to shove their products into as many recipes as possible.

Ultimately, I couldn't tip out the corn. It definitely didn't help that most stories about "my awful mother-in-law sabotaged my cooking" seem to involve somebody sneaking into the host's kitchen and ruining the homemade spaghetti sauce (it's almost always spaghetti sauce) with something from a can. 

I didn't think Mrs. Wendt was maliciously sabotaging everyone clipping dinner ideas from this week's Recipe Exchange, but I couldn't ignore the similarity. Maybe she actually liked canned corn on her spaghetti. Or, she may have simply added corn to nearly everything she made, and subjected her Italian delight to the same treatment. Or, maybe she was using canned corn to "volumize" the recipe (as my mother puts it). After all, there was a Depression on and she probably had a lot of kids and a husband to feed.

 

Even though I couldn't bring myself to add a can of corn to a massive vat of spaghetti sauce, I wanted to know if it was any good. And so, I removed some of the pan's contents and added the unbelievable ingredient. The corn kernels, with their bright yellow color, looked horribly out of place. It was like the Italian delight had suddenly sprouted yellow warning lights.

If Mrs. Wendt was "volumizing" the spaghetti with canned corn, she must have had a very large family at home. The Italian delight nearly overflowed the skillet. And keep in mind that I have removed about a quarter of the delight so that I could put corn in a test sample of it.

I thought that Mrs. Wendt had skimped on the cheese, but then again there was a Depression on.

As the cheese melted, it dripped into the pits and crevices all over the the top of the Italian delight, unveiling the corn that it had halfheartedly hidden before baking. I think the corn made it look like a sort of beef-noodle casserole instead of a pasta bake. To Mrs. Wendt's credit, she never said this was a pasta bake but an "Italian delight."

The Italian delight with, um, "corned beef" was surprisingly good. You just had to reframe your mind. It isn't the baked pasta we would make today. It's more like more like a beef-tomato casserole with macaroni in it. Honestly, I would have gone ahead and added chopped celery with the canned corn.

It's easy to forget that even simple things like baked pasta can change a lot in 90 years. I was really thrown off because this was similar to something we'd make today. When I make something so old it's archaic (such as mincemeat with raisins and kidneys), it's easy to act like I'm trying foods from a country I've never been to. But I wasn't prepared for the food to be so similar to modern-day dishes, yet unignorably different. 

But for those who can't countenance corn in spaghetti, here is a plate of the corn-free Italian delight.

The corned spaghetti was good enough that I would have kept the leftovers even if they didn't contain a lot of beef. Like a lot of things we've made from the Recipe Exchange, it's not fancy but it's something you'd love to come home to. In a weird way, the remaining pan of "normal" corn-free Italian delight tasted like something was missing. Or maybe I'm daft-- or both. Either way, after nixing the canned mushrooms, this recipe was a delight.

Herbed Spaghetti: or, This is why we are all obsessed with pasta

Sometimes, the best things are simple and buttery.

Herbed Spaghetti 1 pound thin spaghetti 4 to 6 cloves garlic, pressed or finely minced 3 tbsp olive oil ½ cup butter, melted 1 cup fresh herbs, chopped (chives, parsley, dill, green onion tops) Salt to taste Cook the spaghetti in salted water until done. While the spaghetti is cooking, saute the garlic in the oil until golden. Remove from heat. Add butter, herbs, and salt. After draining the spaghetti, toss it with the herbs. Serve immediately. Serves 6.     Herbed Pasta with Mushrooms: Quarter all ingredient amounts. Instead of spaghetti, use pasta shells, corkscrews, or any other noodle shape that is suitable for mixing with chunky things. (With spaghetti or any other string-type pasta, the mushrooms will never quite mix in.) Saute the garlic in the olive oil (just like the original recipe). After the garlic is golden, add 8 oz of sliced mushrooms to the frying pan. Saute the mushrooms until done. Then slowly add about 2 tablespoons of flour to thicken the pan juices, stirring very fast to prevent lumps. Stir in the butter and herbs. When the butter is melted and all is mixed, remove from heat. Mix with the hot, drained noodles and serve immediately. Note: If you're not serving the spaghetti directly out of the pot, put it in the serving bowl before adding the herbs. That way, none of the herbs cling to the pot and get left behind. Source: The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

This recipe appears in a community cookbook with no one's name underneath it. I find the unsigned recipes in compilation cookbooks the most interesting. Why would anyone send a recipe and not want credit for it? Or do anonymous recipes happen when the Cookbook Committee feel like something should not be omitted from the book, even if no one sent it in? Perhaps someone in a Committee (always capitalized) meeting said something like "No one sent in herbed spaghetti? That shows up at every summer social!" and wrote the ingredient list out on the spot.

At any rate, this seemed like as good a time as any to try out this knife I got for Christmas. Its premise of operation looked intriguing, although the eagle on the handle is a bit much for me. I don't like my kitchenware to look like it's headed to a political rally.

Questionable iconography aside, I was a bit leery of the wooden cutting board that came with it. It seemed like it would not do well with my "shove everything in the dishwasher" approach to kitchen management.

I was going to cut up the herbs in small batches. Then I decided that the best way to test this thing was to overload it. Realistically, I need to know how well a kitchen device holds up to moderate-to-severe misuse before deciding whether it should permanently move into the kitchen. And so, I crammed all the green stuff into the bowl that came with this thing. It looked unexpectedly photogenic.

The bowl may not appear overloaded, but that's because the knife is weighing the herbs down.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well this thing worked. In a surprisingly short time, it reduced all our lovely fresh herbs to green confetti. It was like using a food processor without having to clean all the plastic parts later.So while this isn't something I can't live without, I won't rush to re-gift it either.

Countertop toys aside, here is where we get to the real fun of the recipe: adding enough garlic to weed out unworthy men. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think garlic bread is a relationship test.) You should know two things. One, I put in exactly as much garlic as the recipe calls for, and no more. Two, I quartered the entire recipe- garlic included. My eyes literally watered (that is not a complaint) while I stirred this.

The rest of the recipe is agreeably straightforward. We are supposed to melt the butter before we stir it in, which makes sense if you're not quartering the recipe. By the time you've melted an entire Junior League's worth of butter, the garlic already in your pan will have burnt. But  after quartering the recipe, I figured this small piece of butter could melt in the pan quickly enough. For those making the recipe in its original amounts, a whole stick of butter may seem excessive and also stereotypically southern. But keep in mind that said butter is going onto an entire pound of spaghetti. (It's still a lot of butter, though.)

Lastly, we add in the herbs. I noted that the recipe has you adding them at the absolute very end of the recipe. I guess our greens would go black and slimy if they cooked in the butter for more than a few seconds. The main thing to note is that ever since weed got upscaled to cannabis, I can never look at a pan of green stuff in oil the same again.

Our herbs shrank a lot in their short time in a hot pan. I wasn't expecting them to be reduced to such a small pile on top of the noodles.

Reminder: this green pile started out as enough herbs to fill a medium-sized salad bowl.

After stirring our herbed spaghetti together, it looked like I thought it would when I first decided to make it. It also smelled every bit as wonderful as I hoped.

I wasn't expecting to like dill in this, but I put it in anyways because someone (again, the recipe has no one's name under it) thought it was good enough to add here. Also, I've only ever encountered dill in pickles, and was curious to see what happens when dill gets separated from cucumbers. It was really good here, and I would definitely add it when making this again.

In short, this recipe is as good as it is simple. It's one of those recipes that seems too easy to bother writing down, just like few people need to consult instructions when making cinnamon toast. But I hadn't thought of making spaghetti with fresh dill and would never have done it had I not seen this written down.

Since I had a lot of extra dill and parsley in the refrigerator, I made herbed spaghetti again as soon as the garlic smell from the last batch got out of the house-- which took an unexpectedly long time. A house is never drafty when you need it to be. 

I couldn't help thinking that the recipe would be fantastic with few mushrooms in it. Because it's almost impossible to stir large things like sliced mushrooms into spaghetti (they always separate out and end up in a pile at the bottom of the pot), I used pasta shells instead. That way, everything would mix together.

And so, after the garlic had become a golden brown but before adding the herbs, we filled the frying pan with fungus. This led to a problem I should have seen coming: the mushrooms exuded a lot of juice. I didn't want to drain it off and throw it out (in part because I'd be pouring away the precious roasted garlic with the mushroom fluid). But I didn't want a puddle of mushroom-water at the bottom of an otherwise exquisite plate of pasta. 

And so, muttering to myself that no Italians were watching anyway, I stirred in enough flour to turn our mushroom water into a sauce that would stick to the noodles. I should note that the mushroom gravy tasted even better than I anticipated because it drew out the flavor of the garlic the entire time the mushrooms cooked. I hadn't even added our herbs yet, and this was already turning into something divine. The rest of the recipe was just as easy as last time: dump the herbs into the pan, pour everything onto the noodles, and serve. 

It's the best pasta I've had in ages. I cannot recommend it enough. Obviously, the herbs are open to variation.  But I strongly suggest trying fresh dill among the greens you choose. 

 

Fanny Cradock bakes our turkey!

Behold what has entered into the kitchen!

Thanks Mom!

Baked Turkey with Mushrooms 1 turkey 2 pint boxes sliced mushrooms 1 package (12 oz) raw bacon* Pepper 1 or 2 tbsp very soft butter Chicken stock Heat the oven to 325°. Select a roasting pan with higher sides than a normal 9"x13", and line it with foil. Cut the bacon slices into squares. Mix them with the mushrooms, adding pepper and any other seasonings you'd like. Don't add any salt, the bacon adds plenty of it. Separate any bacon pieces that try to stick together, so they're nicely dispersed among the mushrooms. Set aside. Lay the bird on its back in the roasting pan and pinch at the breast and leg skin to loosen it. Get your hand under it and gradually free it from the meat without taking it off the bird. Rub the top of the skin all over with the butter (if the butter is a bit hard, work it in your hands for a bit to soften it up). Stuff the mushrooms and bacon under the skin, inserting absolutely as many as possible. In addition to getting mushrooms over the breast, try to get some over the legs. The turkey skin will stretch much more than you may expect, and you will probably get all of them under it.† Stuff the turkey if you so desire, and bake it.‡ Put a loose foil tent on top of it for the last third of the baking time. The turkey is ready when a thermometer in the thigh joint reads 180°. If you stuffed it, put a thermometer right into the center of the stuffing and make sure it's 170°. Let the bird stand 15 minutes before carving it up. Serve the mushrooms on the side. *Fanny Cradock says to use raw ham instead if you can get it. But as raw ham is often hard to find or very expensive, she says raw bacon will be just fine. †You don't need to discard any extra mushrooms. Simply cook them in a frying pan and serve them on the side. Make sure they're cooked thoroughly since they've been in such close contact with meat, and enjoy the bacon-flavored mushrooms. ‡I just used the baking times on the Butterball website since Fanny Cradock doesn't give any on TV. Source: Your Christmas Bird, Fanny Cradock Cooks for Christmas, BBC 1975

The grocery stores near Our Mom of Cookrye put the turkeys on a fantastically steep clearance, marking them down until they were literally cheaper than liver. And what might one do with this lovely bounty? We consult our dearly-treasured inspiration, whose disapproving gaze we hope ever falls upon our culinary endeavors: Fanny Cradock!

First, I love that apparently in Britain we call it a Christmas bird. It's like having a cookout and telling everyone we're eating pig sausages and sliced cow. As Fanny Cradock begins working over the turkey on camera, she says what so many people have thought for years: "Turkey, let's face it, traditional as it is, is a very dry bird!" She then immediately tells us the solution to to the dryness: bacon!

These scissors look like they should be hopelessly worn and dull, but somehow they're not.

A lot of professional chefs seriously underrate cutting food with scissors. Apparently it just doesn't look "professional" to put your green leafy things into a cup and snip them finely, even though it is often faster. More relevant to today's recipe, the bacon slithered all over the cutting board when I tried to use a knife like a "real" cook, but the scissors had the bacon cut up in less than a minute. (Also, don't worry about the germy counters, I had a spray bottle of cleaner which I brought forth after every step!) 

The bacon is here today to lubricate our very dry bird. I love how blunt Fanny Cradock is- other people would use more delicate, cookbook-worthy words when giving a recipe. But I cannot dispute the technique- it's a classier version of what we've been doing at Thanksgiving for years. Only instead of bacon, my aunt puts I Can't Believe It's Not Butter under the turkey skin and squishes it around to distribute it across the bird. The results are so good that you forget that you cancelled all the supposed health benefits of eating a nice, naturally-lean turkey instead of a grease-laden duck.

pictured: Turkey lubricant.

And now we get to the stuffing. Here in America, families all have very carefully-kept traditional turkey recipes. Any variations inevitably meet with a lot of grumbling about how it's not like it's always been. And so, I decided to make my friend's mom's recipe that she's always done. The recipe that tastes like childhood to him is as follows: "Open the bag and make to package directions."

Said directions involve an entire stick of "butter or margarine." While we do have butter, we also have the rest of an unused box of oleo (that's margarine to you) from when we made cookies from Maxine Menster's grave.

There's enough oleo in this bowl to make an entire batch of Christmas cookies.

I'll have you know that where I'm from, we never use stuffing mix. We use made-from-scratch Jiffy cornbread and cans of mushroom soup that we opened ourselves. 

Back to the turkey. Fanny Cradock claims that putting raw ham into dishes instead of salt is a very common, very old French trick. I don't know if that's true or not, she often made things up and claimed they were old French cooking traditions. Nevertheless, she claims that many old French kitchens will have a dried ham (which she helpfully tells us is a jambon de Bayonne) hanging from the ceiling. Apparently cooks will grate a bit off of it instead of merely using salt. I don't know if that it is true, but jambon de Bayonne is indeed a real type of ham. Because it is French, the Wikipedia article goes into loving detail about what an ancient and revered tradition it is. 

You know what other ancient and traditional way we have to cure slabs of pig? What sacred technique we have that dates back thousands of years, perfected over the millenia? Bacon, and you can eat it without wearing fancy clothes. But to properly insert our bacon, we come at last to the most entertaining part of the recipe: preparing the skin to receive our turkey.

I suspect Fanny Cradock pre-loosened the turkey skin before they started taping the episode. She makes it look like you just pinch the skin a little bit and then it practically slips off. In reality, we had to pinch and tug at it a lot before getting our hand under there and reaching everywhere under the skin to make it let go of the meat below. 

I love how the mushrooms on the turkey legs make them look a bit like leg-o-mutton sleeves on a 120-year-old dress. We bought more mushrooms than we thought the turkey could hold under its skin, thinking we could just cook the extras in a frying pan and eat them on the side. But the skin actually stretched until we could shove two whole pint boxes of sliced mushrooms (and of course an entire package of bacon) under it. We also got all the stuffing to fit in there. I've heard stuffing expands, and that therefore one should leave extra room in the turkey for it to grow. But we were all wondering if it would crack the turkey ribs from beneath. Therefore, we packed the turkey hard to find out.

I think the best stuffing (whether it's cornbread, rice, white bread, or whatever else you like) is the stuffing that's baked inside the turkey. Cooking it in a pan is just not the same, even if you lay raw turkey meat on top of it to imbue it with flavor from above while it bakes. 

Now, a lot of people think you can't put the stuffing in the turkey because it's unsafe. So the theory goes, the turkey gets properly cooked, but the stuffing (which has as many raw-bird germs mixed into it as the turkey itself) doesn't quite get hot enough in the very center. The solution to this is simple: pretend you stuffed the entire bird with raw meat. Then, cook it until the imaginary raw meat is hot enough to be fully-cooked. Just stick your thermometer right into the center of the stuffing and make sure it's as hot as cooked meat should be.

But with that said, some of you following along at home might notice a problem just waiting to ruin everything. You see, we tested the biggest pan in the house for fit by dropping the still-wrapped-at-the-time turkey in it. No bird extremities dangled over the edge. Yes, it was a little bit shallower than most roasting pans, but we figured we could skip the chicken broth Fanny Cradock pours around her turkey on the show. In theory, nothing could slosh out of the pan since we poured nothing in it. It only took 30 minutes before we heard the first sizzles hit the oven floor. Within half an hour, the smoke alarm was carefully removed from the wall and the kitchen looked like this.

These fans are the real MVPs of tonight's turkey.

I'm not proud of being so quickly experienced at airing out a kitchen after turning the oven into a smoking mess. I let everyone else know that once again we had smoke in the house.

Texting has succeeded where those 1950s whole-house intercoms failed, freeing us from having to actually traverse the house to speak.

For those of you who are just popping in, that response refers to when we smoked out the kitchen in an attempt to cook a duck. While the door was propped open, a nighttime wanderer chose to visit:

And so, when we should have been doing literally anything else while the turkey tended to itself for a few hours in the oven, we were instead stationed in the kitchen and doing wildlife patrol. You never know who will think an open door is an invitation.

As for the cause of the smoke-induced open door, I could not find anywhere in the pan that was dripping. Yes, the oven was covered in charring splatters, but the pan wasn't anywhere near overflowing with juices. Neither the legs nor the wings were hanging over the edge. Then I saw a bubble come up and burst with a massive BLUP, followed by a landing sizzle and yet more smoke attacking me in the face before the fans (yes fans plural) blew it out the door. And so, we frantically tried to spoon out as much as we could without burning ourselves.

It'll make a good soup for one.

While we did manage to stop any further splashovers, the oven already looked like this.

Let us now appreciate self-cleaning ovens.

But believe it or not, the turkey actually came out fine! I was afraid it'd either be dried out or have a faint overtaste from all the smoke that it shared the oven with. The mushrooms shrank a lot, meaning that the meat under them had absorbed their lovely mushroom flavor. Also, the turkey no longer had unnerving mushroom and bacon bulges. You could serve it to your family without everyone thinking the bird looked ruined.

Although in full disclosure, the turkey is a bit mottled with black from the subcutaneous mushrooms. Let's get a better look at what one sees when removing a Fanny Cradock turkey from the oven. As you can see, the turkey skin has retracted over the mushrooms, squeezing the juice out of them as they shrank beneath it.

Also, while the stuffing did expand as we had heard it tends to do, we didn't get any amusing bird ruptures. The stuffing readily found its way out of the existing holes in the bird. The end result looked a lot like the turkey extruded stuffing like a Play-Doh nozzle, emerging in a perfect cylinder with a crispy, ahem, butt end.

Note also the almost unnervingly-blackened mushrooms crawling under the skin.

 

Cooking a turkey felt peculiarly ritualistic compared to doing any of the other species of bird one meets in the supermarket. While I knew that objectively I was simply cooking meat from the clearance bin, it felt like I was doing the sacred duty of the holiday (note that we weren't cooking this for a holiday feast but for a weeknight). 

Anyway, we gave the bird its 15 minutes of standing time and then attempted to cut it. As magnificent as any whole bird looks when brought to table with a golden skin, there is no dignified way to present what's left after you've cut it up.

But despite the oven smoke, this bird was perfect. Not only was it not dry, but we ended up putting away the carving knife and gently prying the meat off with a fork. The meat didn't fall off the bones, it slid away from them. Using just a fork, the entire turkey breast came off in one piece, not even leaving little residual meat shreds behind on the ribs. If you look at the big turkey breast, you can spy the mushroom dents.

Behold the great tower of turkey!

In case you doubt how easy this bird was to carve, these bones just fell out of various parts of it. They really did slip out of the bird this clean, meaning all the meat went to the serving plate.

 

The mushrooms themselves were delicious after spending several hours taking on the flavor of the bacon and turkey. We saved them all out on their own plate. The bacon itself, however, was bland and mushy. But that's not a demerit on this recipe- the bacon had done its duty and imparted all its bacony deliciousness directly into the bird.

We just piled all the mushrooms onto the skin and lifted them out like a food hammock.

I don't know why Fanny Cradock's turkey method isn't a lot better known because it is delicious. Is it because Fanny Cradock herself is barely a cook anymore but a badly-aged retro joke? Even the BBC mercilessly describes her as "the formidable Fanny in a series of lurid frocks." Is it because it looks weird to shove things under the bird skin? It may look weird when you put it in the oven, but a lot of people put various things right under the turkey skin. Also, this method doesn't involve getting any intimidatingly unfamiliar ingredients that we don't see at any other time of year. Nor does Fanny Cradock use any weird techniques that are impossible without years of practice.

The bacon added a marvelous savory overtone to the turkey, and the mushrooms completed the flavor. Furthermore, I want to emphasize that we didn't even need a knife to carve it off the bones. I'd be willing to nab another turkey and cook it just like this regardless of whether it was a holiday. As a bonus, if you're not putting on a whole Thanksgiving feast, this bird is a complete meal in one dish. Like an elevated casserole with more presentational panache, you get your meat, vegetable, and bread all in one baking pan.

 

We have to salute Fanny Cradock. A lot of her recipes aged really badly (liver roll-ups  or mincemeat omelet, anyone?), but her basics are amazing. She always uses slightly different methods than everyone else (like frying chips -AKA French fries- twice), but the results are always amazing. We've now done all the species from her episode on cooking Christmas birds- (see the chicken with subcutaneous mushrooms, and the duck with honey), and all of them are absolutely delicious.