Blogs

I invented this!

I can only giggle sometimes when people try to figure out who invented what dish/recipe and then come up with something like - French toast was invented by a certain Albert French (I think this was the name) in some small town in America (I read this somewhere on CHOW but I cant find it again)! Its been around for centuries in Europe and must have come over with the founding fathers. Why it should be called "French" toast is another story. Surfing from blog to blog on the net I also came across scores of sites that celebrate the new invention of a Louisiana/New Orleans chef (?) called Turducken. Apart from the fact that I find the title somewhat unfortunate - I keep getting stuck on the first 4 letters - this stuffing one bird into another into another with variously flavoured stuffing mixes to fill the gaps has also been around for centuries: It was a famous dish in England in the eighteenth century (but "invented" much earlier, I am sure) called a York Christmas Pie or Yorkshire Goose Pie (the goose taking the place of the turkey - a Goo-ducken?) and was specially ordered from York by London's rich people for Christmas. One of the most interesting reactions of one blogger at least was that the fatty skin of the duck inside the turkey was somewhat unpalatable - I think that might well be true. On the other hand, if one uses various well-flavoured pate/forcemeat mixtures (as in the Time/Life Good Cook series on Pates) I think it would be best eaten cold, in which case the duck's skin might be less disturbing. Yorkshire Christmas Pie Recipe 18TH CENTURY RECIPE! Instructions Take a goose, partridge, turkey and pigeon, and open each down the back. Bone them and flatten them out. Season all well with a mixture of ½oz each mace, black pepper and nutmeg. ¼oz ground cloves and 2 heaped teaspoons salt. Place each bird, beginning with the smallest into the next in size, finishing with the turkey, so that it looks like one enormous bird. Truss and put into a raised pie crust; fill up any spaces with chopped-up hare or woodcock, and forcemeat. Put 2lb butter on top, cover with a lid of pastry and bake for 4 hours. The only thing that distinguishes the Turducken is the Creole/Cajun flavourings.