Turducken facts for kids
A Turducken is a special dish where a deboned (bones removed) chicken is stuffed inside a deboned duck, which is then stuffed inside a deboned turkey. It's like a giant, layered bird! Outside of the United States and Canada, people often call it a three bird roast. A similar dish called Gooducken is popular in England. It uses a goose instead of a turkey.
The name turducken is a mix of the words turkey, duck, and chicken. This dish is a type of "engastration." This is a fancy word for stuffing one animal inside another for cooking. In this case, it's two animals stuffed inside a third!
The spaces inside the chicken and the other birds are usually filled with tasty stuffing. This stuffing can be a seasoned breadcrumb mix or sausage meat. Some turduckens even have different stuffings for each bird. The finished turducken is a solid, layered poultry dish. You can cook it in many ways, like roasting, grilling, or barbecuing.
The turducken became very popular in America thanks to John Madden. He was a famous sports commentator. He often talked about this unusual dish during NFL Thanksgiving Day games. He even showed how it was made on TV. Once, he cut a turducken with his bare hand during a live broadcast to show everyone what was inside!
How Turducken Started
No one is completely sure who first made the turducken. But many people agree that Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme helped make it famous. A store called Hebert's Specialty Meats in Maurice, Louisiana, says they created it in 1985. The owners, Junior and Sammy Hebert, say a local man brought them his birds and asked them to create the dish.
Dr. Gerald R. LaNasa, a surgeon from New Orleans, was also known for making turduckens. He was very skilled at removing the bones from the birds. He sometimes added pork or veal roasts inside the chicken. His special recipes often included andouille sausage and foie gras. Today, you can buy turduckens that are made in a similar way to Dr. LaNasa's creations. His ideas helped make this dish a favorite holiday meal in the southern United States.
In the United Kingdom, a turducken is called a "three-bird roast" or a "royal roast." In 1989, a company offered a five-bird roast. It had a goose, a turkey, a chicken, a pheasant, and a pigeon, all stuffed with sausage. This was like a modern version of an old English Christmas pie.
A Gooducken is a goose stuffed with a duck, which is then stuffed with a chicken.
Older Versions of Stuffed Roasts
People have been stuffing birds inside other birds for a very long time! In 1807, a food writer named Grimod de La Reynière wrote about his "roast without equal." This amazing dish had a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, and many other smaller birds. The smallest bird was just big enough to hold an olive! This shows that even ancient Romans made similar layered roasts.
Another old recipe was called Pandora's cushion. This dish was a goose stuffed with a chicken, which was then stuffed with a quail.
A famous French diplomat and food lover, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, also had his own special recipe. In 1891, a newspaper described his "Quail à la Talleyrand":
You 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. Again, you put the chicken inside a fine Berri turkey, and roast the turkey very carefully. 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 is really three fowls, is ready. You pull the chicken out of the turkey, and the quail out of the chicken. The quail? 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.
There's also a story from India in the late 1800s about a huge stuffed dish. It was served to a princess by Maharajah Ganga Singh. He told her:
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.
See also
In Spanish: Turducken para niños
