Cooking the Thanksgiving turkey was even more difficult in the old days

The turkey is central to this early 1900s postcard, “A Bountiful Thanksgiving.”

By Catherine Cooper, Orleans County Historian

“Illuminating Orleans” – Vol. 3, No. 37

Turkey cooking anxiety affects many cooks at this time of year. After all, the roasted fowl is the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving meal. Thankfully, virtual assistance is at hand – talk, text and live chat options are now available to provide advice.

Thawing the turkey is a common concern. How long does it take? Can it be thawed outside the refrigerator? What if it did not thaw sufficiently?

Earlier cooks also had to contend with turkey cooking issues. But their turkeys were not frozen. Nor were they plucked clean, with a selection of the innards wrapped in plastic and nestled inside the clean cavity.

Here are instructions from The White House Cookbook (1900 edition) on how to cook a roast turkey: Select a young turkey; remove all the feathers carefully, singe it over a burning newspaper on the top of the stove, then “draw” [clear the innards] it nicely, being very careful not to break any of the internal organs; remove the crop [pouch at the base of the neck which may contain food] carefully; cut off the head, and tie the neck close to the body by drawing the skin over it.

Now rinse the inside of the turkey out with several waters, and in the next to last, mix a teaspoonful of baking soda; oftentimes the inside of a fowl is very sour, especially it is not freshly killed. Soda, being cleansing, acts as a corrective, and destroys that unpleasant taste which we frequently experience in the dressing when fowls have been killed for some time.

After washing, wipe the turkey dry, inside and out, with a clean cloth, rub the inside with salt, then stuff with “Dressing for Fowls.”

First published in 1887, The White House Cookbook was very popular and was often given as a wedding gift. As the subtitle indicates, it was a “comprehensive cyclopedia of information for the home” In addition to recipes and menus, it contained instructions for household management and caring for the sick, such as how to fix cement cracks in a floor or how remove cinders from the eye.

It also includes breakfast, dinner, and supper menus for a week in each month of the year as well as menus for holidays: