[JonK]

My wife, who favors culinary engineering projects more than I, recalls reading a recipe (or maybe a description) for a deboned fowl that was stuffed with successively smaller deboned fowls (as an example, though not necessarily what she remembers, might be a turkey stuffed with a chicken which is in turn stuffed with a Cornish hen, all deboned).

At her direction, I looked through my rather extensive collection of cookbooks and clipped recipes with no success. The only thing I did find was Julia Child's melon ball chicken which features a deboned chicken stuffed with seasoned ground chicken meat. (We made that 10 or so years ago, and it was very good.)

Has anyone heard of this poultry equivalent of the nested puzzle box? What is it called? Do you have a reference to a recipe?

This is not my kind of cooking, but continued marital bliss requires that I post the question to this esteemed group of culinary devotees.

[kuan]

Turducken.

[JonK]

Thank you, kuan. Googling "turducken" told all I might want to know.

JonK

[Culprit]

I've wanted to try one of those concoctions for a long time. Anyone tried the Turducken? How'd you like it? I recognize that I probably don't have the knife skills to do the work, so I'd have to buy one. Is it worth the $70+ bucks?

[kuan]

Go buy a coupla chickens and try deboning them first. It's not that hard. First get yourself a nice sharp paring knife for cutting through joints and an older paring knife for scraping meat off the bones.

First cut down each side of the wishbone, cut through the wing joint, and pull it out. You gotta crack the wishbone from the breastbone. Pull the meat off the ribcage like you're taking off a sock until you get to the thigh joint. Cut through the thigh joint. Start scraping the meat off the thing joint until you get to the leg. Cut through that and do the same. Keep going until you pull the legbone out from the inside. There ya go. It's all done.

The birds are all the same with minor differences. If you're brave, you can do quail-game hen-chicken-duck-turkey! Happy butchering!