Turduckeneasquail (tər·dŭk/·ə·nē·skwāl/) n. 1. A dish composed of six nested layers of poultry -- turkey, duck, chicken, guinea hen, squab, and quail -- interspersed with layers of stuffing; cf. turducken. 2. The single most complicated preparation ever attempted on Frost Street.
I usually spend Thanksgiving at my parents' house. The meal is pretty standard: turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie. These are all satisfying foods, but not especially exciting. So this weekend Lisa and I had a pre-Thanksgiving meal for some friends in our apartment. And since nobody could accuse me of ruining a family holiday if I screwed up the main dish, I decided to try something extremely risky that, to my knowledge, has never been done before. I took Paul Prudhomme's legendary preparation known as turducken--a complex operation that requires deboning a turkey, duck, and chicken and stuffing them one inside the other--and doubled it. Adding three more birds to the equation, I ended up with this:
To the casual observer, it appears to be nothing more than a slightly overstuffed, overcooked turkey. But concealed within this unremarkable shell is a tale of fiendish complexity and mind-bending culinary daring. If you turned this bird inside out, here is what you would find:
Layer upon layer of fowl, completely deboned by yours truly and interspersed with five layers of stuffing. The assembly is quite similar to Prudhomme's, and his instructions for de-boning the fowl are quite good. I avoided his cajun influence in my stuffing and seasonings, however, leaving out the shrimp stuffing and Poultry Magic. Instead, I soaked the birds in a maple and brown sugar brine. This was how I learned that to fit a fourteen-pound turkey into a one-gallon container, all you have to do is remove its skeleton.
Six birds means five stuffings. I tried to think of flavors that would pair well with the birds around them, but in the end I just tried to avoid flavors that would clash. Here is my Turduckeneasquail schematic:
Turkey
Cornbread Stuffing
Duck
Chestnut-Pumpernickel Stuffing
Chicken
Sausage Stuffing
Guinea Hen
Mushroom Stuffing
Squab
Smoked Oyster Stuffing
Quail
I tried to wrap the quail around a hard-boiled egg, but it was too slippery and wouldn't stay in place during the assembly. I don't think I'll go into all the stuffing recipes here, since stuffing is a very personal thing to most people. Suffice it to say that if you have a big enough stockpot (which, fortunately, I do), you can make enough stock from six carcasses to make lots of stuffing and a good giblet gravy (with all the tasty giblets from your six birds), and still have enough stock left over to freeze for future use.
This economy of scraps is how I brought Lisa around to the idea of hosting a turduckeneasquail dinner. When I first proposed it, she objected on grounds that it was wasteful. Not so, I replied: nothing in these birds is wasted; their giblets will be in our gravy, their bones will be in our stock, their meat will be in the bellies of our guests. Lisa then refined her objection, accusing my turduckeneasquail of being decadent. But as you know, there's a difference between decadence and waste. I despise and eschew the latter, while I embrace and celebrate the former.
Lisa is less comfortable with decadence than I am. To even out our karma, I promised to make a donation to City Harvest. Lisa's modesty was satisfied, and our dozen or so guests were able to enjoy a dish that may never be tasted again. Tasty as it was, I don't think I'll ever again be inclined to invest the twenty-or-so hours it took to prepare this beast for the oven.
