“Haute for the Holidays,” by Jeffrey Steingarten, was originally published in the November 1994 issue of Vogue.
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Today we celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the most famous turkey in Franco American culinary history. I refer, of course, to the bird shot in October 1794 in the wilds of Connecticut by the great French gastronome and magistrate Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. For three years Brillat-Savarin had taken refuge from the French Revolution in an America of Edenic plenty, of sweet corn, squash, persimmons, and pumpkins, of lobsters and oysters and inexhaustible game—venison and turkeys, quail and geese, canvasback ducks and passenger pigeons, whose flocks covered the rivers and darkened the autumn skies.
“While I was in Hartford, in Connecticut, I had the good luck to kill a wild turkey,” he writes in his immortal Physiology of Taste (M.F.K. Fisher’s translation). “This deed deserves to go down in history, and I shall recount it all the more eagerly since I myself am its hero.” He and a friend, Mr. King, rode out from Hartford on two hired nags and by nightfall arrived for dinner at their host’s farm, five leagues—15 or 20 miles—away. Brillat-Savarin, Mr. King, and their host dined on stewed goose, a handsome piece of corned beef, a magnificent leg of mutton, and root vegetables of all kinds. At each end of the table were enormous jugs of excellent cider, and their host had four fine and radiantly healthy daughters, aged 16 to 20, whom Brillat-Savarin admired at every turn.
The next morning, Brillat-Savarin and Mr. King set out for the hunt. “I found myself for the first time in my life in virgin forest, where the sound of the axe had never been heard.” He wandered about with delight. “First of all we killed some of those pretty little grey partridges which are so plump and so tender. Then we knocked down six or seven grey squirrels, highly thought of in [America]; and finally our lucky start led us into the midst of a flock of wild turkeys.” As the turkeys rose into the sky, Mr. King fired first, missing entirely and scattering the rest. But one laggard turkey, lazier than the others, took flight just ten paces from Brillat-Savarin. “I fired at it through a break in the woods, and it fell, stone dead.” Mr. King claimed to have hit a turkey too, but even his dog, leading them deep into boundless woods and impenetrable thickets, could not find it. Hopelessly lost, they were finally rescued by the silvery voices of their host’s young daughters.
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