The Poultry - Cooking Old Tom

Cooking Old Tom

I have decided to cook the old tom this weekend, for leftovers. We are going to relatives for dinner, so we won't have any.   He is 24 lbs., but I daren't use him for guests because he might be tough.  The older turkeys we have butchered in the past have not been tough, but they were not this old.  If he turns out tough, I can make him into stew and if he turns out well, we can have friends over for leftovers... or freeze him in sections for later leftovers for us.  That's the plan, anyway.

 

 

I defrosted him in a cooler in the kitchen.  It took 48 hours.  Then I put him in the roaster on the front porch to stay cool while I went to town to get the rest of the 'fixins'.

 

 

 

 

 

I decided to do this bird the old old-fashioned way: the way my gramma did hers.  I boiled the neck and the giblets for a couple of hours, carefully removing the liver after only a half hour.  I used the broth from that to moisten the seasoned bread crumbs.  I added chopped onion, celery, liver, gizzard, and heart to the bread crumbs and also a couple of large duck eggs, beaten.  I always thought that the thing that set my grandmother's stuffing apart was the fact that she put summer savory in it.  I can't buy that here, so I have to grow it.  I added that and some parsley that I had dried from the garden and stuffed the mixture into both cavities of the bird.  I had enough left to fill a one quart baking dish as well.  I will cook that after the bird comes out.  I rubbed the outside of the bird with olive oil and salt and pepper.   No brine, no fancy stuffing, nothing tricky.





 

I do not own a meat themometer. I cooked this 24 pound, stuffed bird  for four and a half hours at 350 degrees.  (If I were at sea level I would cook it at 325, but here it needs to be 350.)  I cooked it with the roasting pan lid on.  The humidity is so low here that drying out is always a risk.  I checked it often but it did not seem to need basting.

 

 

Above is what Old Tom looked like after an hour in the oven.  All is well.  A little Dry Sack, a little crudite, a little pickled herring ... and waiting.  The house began to smell very good.  

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

After three and a half hours of cooking, the breast skin split open.  Not good.  I don't know why this happened.  Maybe I should have basted him... but I thought that was to make the skin brown, and it was browning nicely on its own.  I hope this won't mean the breast meat will be dry.  We knew we wouldn't cook with the cover off the roasting pan at all, after this happened. 

 

 

 

After four and a half hours he was done. 

 

 

 

When I lifted Old Tom out of the oven,  the handle on the roasting pan broke off.  I almost had the whole thing land on the floor!  I was lucky to get it to the island without spilling anything.   The breast was not dry but he was tough. The skin was tough and I think that was why it split. So I ate between the sinews on one leg and Jeff had sliced breast meat. The breast was tenderer and I think we can eat more of that just sliced. But the rest goes into the stew pot tomorrow!

 

 





 

 





  

For me, Thanksgiving isn't about pilgrims or indians.  I have an ancestor that was on the Mayflower and I have an ancestor that I'm pretty sure was at least part indian.  What the Americans did to the Native Americans was  genocide, attempted extermination, and I am dedicated to telling the whole truth about it as we teach history to the next generation.  If we could all see the history as if we were European and Native American, then we might get a sense of what really happened.  But that is not what Thanksgiving is about to me.  It is a harvest home celebration in the best of folk traditions from northern Europe, and if you are Christian, it marks the beginning of Advent.  Not the time to put Christmas decorations up, mind you, but a time to start getting ready for Christmas, a time to start thinking about  it.  And definitely not a time to shop until you drop.  (Of course, if you have to mail a lot of things, then you need to get going with the lists anyway).  It is not a time to tell a bunch of feel-good propaganda to children about only their white forebearers, but it can be a time to think about the whole story of the birth of our nation.  We are not perfect, as a people, and our history is not all praiseworthy.  Perhaps if we had a longer history we wouldn't be so hung up on painting it all with a rosey brush.  Nations like China and Britain don't try to whitewash their histories so much.  History is full of good stories and bad ones and they probably all need to be told.   The living record of a literate populace is often where the stories that authority wants to bury lie safely until someone with courage finds them and  brings them to light: in diaries or logs or journals that are secreted away.  So after thinking about it this year, Thanksgiving for me became a time to be thankful for the educational opportunities that are out there for so many Americans and a time to make sure we are doing all we can to insure that fewer and fewer of our people fall through the cracks in the system and fail to acquire basic literacy skills.  We need all the people to be able to read and write and think critically.  We need them all to tell their stories.