Unlike music by the Nine Inch Nails, which is better than it sounds, roast turkey is less good than it sounds. For a reason that I have not been able quite to fathom, it is supposed to be this really exotic christmas meal. Or so I, at any rate, have found.
Whether this is because christians somewhere cook it better, or if it is because it is a dish that is appropriate to the country, I am not sure. Perhaps you need to be near dense and dark pine forests, with clearings for witches and wicked stepmothers who either devour small children or send them out to find strawberries in the snow, to appreciate the comforts of roast turkey.
Yet, such is the theoretical allure of this bird that for a number of years I have seen people be reluctant to contemplate the roasting of any other for their traditional and compulsive (if not compulsory) Christmas overindulgence. After all, the connotation of the word turkey, that is to say of dismal failure, seems to me to be entirely appropriate.
Now if turkey were really so good, why is it that do we not eat it at other times of year? We are not very keen these days on self-denying ordinances, so the idea that we save up something delicious just for a single glorious treat once a year isn't very plausible. If something is good we want it all the time, in and out of season, and are prepared to import it at the greatest expense from Ivory Coast if need be.
So why does turkey so rarely appear on menus, other than in the slightly modified form of cold cuts in mildly exotic buffets? I do not think its size can explain everything. If it were really so splendid, we could cook half, a quarter or even an eighth of a turkey. The fact that we don't eat turkey all the time, or even more than once a year, tells us, or ought to tell us, something.
However, I disregarded these skeptical and dissenting thoughts this year, putting them to the back of my mind, which oddly enough feels as though it really is located at the back of my head, somewhere in my occipital lobe. I took no notice of the small, mocking voice that worms its way forward and tells me it, the turkey, will be no good. But it was still a new year party that was calling me over. So, I tell myself, as a man whistling in the dark, this time the turkey will be delicious.
The first and most serious problem with roasting a turkey is the fat. There is so much of it that normal dishes cannot contain it all, and one has to repeatedly empty the fat into various containers. And while turkey fat might have been thought by grandmothers to have medicinal and preventive properties when rubbed into the chest, and maybe is indeed excellent and perhaps even incomparable for roasting potatoes, yet there is far more of it than you can possibly want or use in a year.
Turkey fat does not keep to itself, either. Turkey fat vapour (or, I suppose it would be more scientific to say, droplets) soon spreads through the whole house, which begins to smells like a vast roast turkey, and remains roasted for a few days thereafter. Mere soap and hot water are powerless against the insidious invasion of turkey fat.
The meat tends to be dense and not easily digestible. It seems to sink directly into special receptacles in the small intestines , where it settles like a lead weight and saps the will for movement for at least two days.
My cousin was with us for the post Christmas yuletide celebration. He ate it with the undiscriminating voracity natural to adolescence, but in the middle of the night his grandmother roused us from our drinks and the scrabble table to say that he had a terrible stomach ache. We found him groaning in his bed and when we offered to examine him, he said, "I want a proper doctor, not you."
In my time in the market I had been on the receiving end of far worse insults than this, and I told him that no such doctor was available, this being Madurai, that I was better than nothing. Reluctantly, he let me examine him. In the end, my diagnosis was that he was establishing an excuse to not do the homework the following day that he had put off ever since he arrived. On the other hand, there is no denying the indigestibility of turkey.
My observations on the disadvantages of turkey as a Christmas bird have been confirmed by others. I am now cured of my illusion. I pledge hereby that in no year, will I be cooking my own goose/turkey. whatever.
