Turducken

Turduckenis a dish associated withLouisiana, consisting of a debonedchickenstuffed into a debonedduck, further stuffed into a debonedturkey. Outside North America it is known as athree-bird roast.Gooduckenis an English variant,replacing turkey withgoose.
The wordturduckenis aportmanteaucombiningturkey,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.
The thoracic cavity of the chicken/game hen and the rest of the gaps are stuffed, sometimes with a highly seasonedbreadcrumbmixture orsausagemeat, although some versions have a differentstuffingfor each bird. The result is a fairly solid layeredpoultrydish, suitable for cooking bybraising,roasting,grilling, orbarbecuing.
The turducken was popularized in America byJohn Madden, who promoted the dish duringNFL Thanksgiving Day gamesand, later,Monday Night Footballbroadcasts.On one occasion, the commentator sawed through a turducken with his bare hand, live in the booth, to demonstrate the turducken's contents.Madden ate his first on-air turducken on December 1, 1996, during a game between theNew Orleans SaintsandSt. Louis Ramsat theLouisiana Superdome.
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 AntiguabyEmilia Pardo Bazan. On page 208, recipe 320 describes a dish calledguisado particularwhich 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.
As a named dish, it is generally agreed to have been introduced byCajunchefPaul Prudhomme. The earliest print reference to the dish is a 1982Newsweekarticle that describes it as a new Prudhomme dish.A 1983New York Daily Newsarticle called the turducken "an example of his inventiveness."In the 1960s, Prudhomme had worked as a chef at a series of resorts in Colorado and Wyoming. In 1984, Prudhomme told theStar Tribunethat 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 Orleansaround 1982, raising the price repeatedly to lower demand because of the day-long cooking process required.Prudhomme trademarked "Turducken" in 1986.In 2003, the food writerJeffrey Steingarteninvestigated the dish's origin and concluded Prudhomme's was "the first, and therefore the authentic, recipe."
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".But Prudhomme's turducken had already been featured in media for several years before Hebert's opened in 1984.
In the United Kingdom, a turducken is a type ofballotinecalled a "three-bird roast" or a "royal roast".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;and a three-bird roast (a duck stuffed with chicken stuffed with a pigeon, with sage and apple stuffing) in 1990.
Gooduckenis agoosestuffed with a duck, which is in turn stuffed with a chicken.
In his 1807Almanach des Gourmands, gastronomistGrimod de La Reynièrepresents hisrôti sans pareil("roast without equal")—abustardstuffed with aturkey, agoose, apheasant, achicken, aduck, aguinea fowl, ateal, awoodcock, apartridge, aplover, alapwing, aquail, athrush, alark, anortolan buntingand agarden warbler—although he states that, since similar roasts were produced by ancient Romans, therôti sans pareilwas not entirely novel.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.
Another version of the dish is credited to French diplomat and gourmandCharles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. The 1891 newspaper articleFrench Legends Of The TableoffersQuail à la Talleyrand:
InHunan cuisine, the famed chefLiu SanhefromChangshainvented 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 herbssuch asGastrodia elataandwolfberries. He originally devised the dish to alleviateLu Diping's ill concubine of headaches.The bookPassion India: The Story of the Spanish Princess of Kapurthula(p. 295) features a section that recounts a similar dish in India in the late 1800s: