Duck if You See This Turkey Coming

On this, Thanksgiving Eve, I think it’s time to talk turkey, or if you come from Louisiana - Turducken. I typed that and my spell check lit up like a turkey grease fire. That’s because Turducken (there it goes again) is a completely unnatural species of animal that I first learned about from my sister-in-law’s husband’s in-laws in Baton Rouge.

Whether the Cajuns invented this atrocity, or just acquired it, I don’t know, but it definitely sounds like something that came from their neck of the woods. They eat crawdads and gators and blackened everything, plus it seems to me like something Emeril might come up with. I heard rumors that he wanted to solve the nutria problem in Louisiana by using creative recipes to cook up the water-dwelling, pre-historic rodent that looks like a gargantuan rat on steroids.

For those of you who have been fortunate enough to never hear of this creature (the Turducken, not the nutria, which is at least a somewhat attractive member of the rodent family, once you get over its mammoth size eight food whiskers), I suggest you quit reading right now, because you’re not going to want to know. Trust me. This is an abomination against nature.

You’re still with me? You know, you can lead a horse to water but if he refuses to drink, well, I rest my case.

A Turducken is a chicken stuffed inside the intestinal cavity of a duck, which is then stuffed inside the intestinal cavity of a turkey. This unwieldy beast is then stuffed inside your oven where it cooks unspeakably, unevenly, and unbecomingly. Understand why I despise it?

Who would have come up with such a thing? There is something about reaching up inside a bird that lowers the threshold of my appetite to begin with. I used to have to turn my head when my mother stuffed fistfuls of dressing into the anal cavity of our family turkey, and I sure wasn’t about to eat any of that stuffing. If I didn’t witness it coming straight out of a separate pan, I wouldn’t touch it.

So to put a whole bird, or de-boned bird, or whatever in the hell it is into another bird is just not right. But my sister-in-law’s in-laws swore it was the best thing on the planet besides marrying your first cousin, so we got one for Thanksgiving a few years back.

I don’t like eating duck for any reason – they are so cute when they come up to you quacking for breadcrumbs, and Daffy and Donald could be their relatives. Eating chickens doesn’t worry me so much after one time when I was little I picked up a chick at my grandfather’s house and a mother hen flew out of nowhere right on top of my head and flogged me with her wings for about two hours. I think chickens are treacherous. I’ve never been intimate with any turkeys so they don’t bother me one way or the other. But on general principle I prefer not to eat anything that’s been shoved into something else’s guts. Have I belabored this point too long? No, I haven’t.

I’ve been vegetarian for years, so I didn’t partake of the Turducken on those grounds, though I would have become vegetarian that very day if it was the only way to avoid the hideous thing. The others reported that it was okay, ranking between possum and road kill, though nothing special. I think even they were grossed out. All I know is this: If a food is called something with the word Turd in it, I’m staying away. I advise you to do the same.