Turducken is a dish associated withLouisiana, consisting of a debonedchicken stuffed into a debonedduck, further stuffed into a debonedturkey. Outside North America it is known as athree-bird roast.[1]Gooducken is an English variant,[2] replacing turkey withgoose.
The termturducken is aportmanteau ofturkey,duck, andchicken. The dish is a form ofengastration, which is a recipe method in which one animal is stuffed inside the gastric passage of another—twofold in this instance.[3]
The thoracic cavity of the chicken/game hen and the rest of the gaps are stuffed, sometimes with a highly seasonedbreadcrumb mixture orsausage meat, although some versions have a differentstuffing for each bird. The result is a fairly solid layeredpoultry dish, suitable for cooking bybraising,roasting,grilling, orbarbecuing.[4]
The turducken was popularized in America byJohn Madden, who promoted the dish duringNFL Thanksgiving Day games and, later,Monday Night Football broadcasts.[5] On one occasion, the commentator sawed through a turducken with his bare hand, live in the booth, to demonstrate the turducken's contents.[6][7] Madden ate his first on-air turducken on December 1, 1996, during a game between theNew Orleans Saints andSt. Louis Rams at theLouisiana Superdome.[8]
Credit for the creation of the turducken is uncertain; othermatryoshka-like stuffed dishes have existed for centuries, in a variety of cultures. One early version is found in the 1913 Spanish cookbookLa Cocina Española Antigua byEmilia Pardo Bazan. On page 208, recipe 320 describes a dish calledguisado particular which is made by first stuffing an olive, then a small bird with the olive, then that stuffed bird is stuffed into another larger bird and so on sixteen times more, then cooked in an open flame for 24 hours.[9]
As a named dish, it is generally agreed to have been introduced byCajun chefPaul Prudhomme. The earliest print reference to the dish is a 1982Newsweek article that describes it as a new Prudhomme dish.[10] A 1983New York Daily News article called the turducken "an example of his inventiveness."[11] In the 1960s, Prudhomme had worked as a chef at a series of resorts in Colorado and Wyoming. In 1984, Prudhomme told theStar Tribune that he had come up with the turducken in 1963 while preparing turkey for a Sunday brunch at one such resort. He said he had started selling turduckens inNew Orleans around 1982, raising the price repeatedly to lower demand because of the day-long cooking process required.[12] Prudhomme trademarked "Turducken" in 1986.[13] In 2003, the food writerJeffrey Steingarten investigated the dish's origin and concluded Prudhomme's was "the first, and therefore the authentic, recipe."[14]
Another claimant is Hebert's Specialty Meats inMaurice, Louisiana, whose owners Widley Hebert Jr. and Sammy Hebert say they created it in 1985 "when a local man brought his own birds to their shop and asked the brothers to create the medley".[15][16] But Prudhomme's turducken had already been featured in media for several years before Hebert's opened in 1984.[17]
In the United Kingdom, a turducken is a type ofballotine called a "three-bird roast" or a "royal roast".[18] The Pure Meat Company offered a five-bird roast (a goose, a turkey, a chicken, a pheasant, and a pigeon, stuffed with sausage), described as a modern revival of the traditional Yorkshire Christmas pie, in 1989;[19][20] and a three-bird roast (a duck stuffed with chicken stuffed with a pigeon, with sage and apple stuffing) in 1990.[19][20]
Gooducken is agoose stuffed with a duck, which is in turn stuffed with a chicken.[21]
In his 1807Almanach des Gourmands, gastronomistGrimod de La Reynière presents hisrôti sans pareil ("roast without equal")—abustard stuffed with aturkey, agoose, apheasant, achicken, aduck, aguinea fowl, ateal, awoodcock, apartridge, aplover, alapwing, aquail, athrush, alark, anortolan bunting and agarden warbler—although he states that, since similar roasts were produced by ancient Romans, therôti sans pareil was not entirely novel.[20][21][22] The final bird is very small but large enough to just hold an olive; it also suggests that, unlike modern multi-bird roasts, there was no stuffing or other packing placed in between the birds.
An early form of the recipe was "Pandora's cushion", a goose stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a quail.[22]
Another version of the dish is credited to French diplomat and gourmandCharles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. The 1891 newspaper articleFrench Legends Of The Table offersQuail à la Talleyrand:[23]
The following for instance, is Talleyrand's fanciful and somewhat roundabout way of roasting a quail. On a day of "inspiration gourmande" at his hotel in theRue Saint-Florentin, Paris, he composed the following recipe: Take a plump quail, seasoned with truffles, and made tender by having been put into champagne. You put it carefully inside a young Bresse chicken; then sew up the opening, and put dabs of butter all over the chicken. Again, you put the chicken inside a fine Berri turkey, and roast the turkey very carefully before a bright fire. What will be the result? All the juice of the turkey is absorbed by the fowl, and all the juice of the fowl in its turn by the quail. After two hours roasting the fowl, which in reality is composed of three fowls, is ready, and you place the steaming trinity upon a dish of fine porcelain or chiseled silver. Then you pull the chicken out of the turkey, and the quail out of the chicken. The quail? Is it correct to talk of the quail, when this delicious, perfumed dish is indeed too good for any name? You take the quail as you would some sacred relic, and serve it hot, steaming, with its aroma of truffles, after having roasted it to a golden yellow by basting it diligently with the best Gournay butter.
InHunan cuisine, the famed chefLiu Sanhe fromChangsha invented a dish calledsanceng taoji (Chinese:三层套鸡), meaning "three-layer set chicken", consisting of a sparrow inside a pigeon inside a hen, along withmedicinal herbs such asGastrodia elata andwolfberries. He originally devised the dish to alleviateLu Diping's ill concubine of headaches.[24]The bookPassion India: The Story of the Spanish Princess of Kapurthula[25] (p. 295) features a section that recounts a similar dish in India in the late 1800s:
Invited by MaharajahGanga Singh to the most extraordinary of dinners, in the palace at Bikaner, when Anita asks her host for the recipe of such a succulent dish, he answers her seriously, "Prepare a whole camel, skinned and cleaned, put a goat inside it, and inside the goat a turkey and inside the turkey a chicken. Stuff the chicken with a grouse and inside that put a quail and finally inside that a sparrow. Then season it all well, place the camel in a hole in the ground and roast it.
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