we just went through turducken season. did anyone else notice? i did. i felt my blood pressure rising. hell, i had my gall bladder removed! who could say that turducken didn't have anything to do w/that? it's that goddamned insidious. let me explain.
nothing bugs me more than someone co-opting someone else's great idea. i know it's the way of the world & all that but it still rankles. i remember down at new college, some art major coming up w/a cute cartoon idea sort of thing(before cartoons had become a big business)& another new college art student taking that cartoon out to los angeles & scoring big. there were slight variations in the drawn characters but anyone from new college at that time couldn't help but know where those characters came from. the thief is still in hollywood making money. the original artist? well, she ain't in hollywood.
at one point, i had all the time/life cookbooks---the ones edited by the great richard olney & the "world cuisine" ones too. ed willard(asshole & ex-friend)& i always went crazy over the creole-arcadian book. it actually inspired my first real eating trip to new orleans(prior trips had basically revolved around staggering down bourbon street, drunk). ed & i ended up eating at mother's & buster holmes & angelo brocato's & leruth's. we tried to get into corinne dunbar's too & i can't say why that didn't happen.
i can say our efforts to eat there were absolutely based on a story in the cookbook on page 113. jimmy plauche the owner of dunbar's had prepared a special dinner for friends of the restaurant. he had heard about stuffing a bird into another into another somewhere. he found nine birds (a snipe tucked into a dove tucked into a quail stuffed into a squab stuffed into a cornish game hen placed into a chicken inserted into a pheasant squeezed into a duck stuffed into a turkey) & the results were stunning: "when the chef carved it, the partakers felt like they were eating a single legendary bird, a sort of poached phoenix." this story spoke directly to our college aged sense of extravagance. like i said, we didn't get to indulge but that unattained extravagance stuck in my mind.
that's why i know for sure & can prove that chef paul prudhomme did not originate the idea for turducken. my time-life "american cooking: creole & arcadian" was published in 1971. chef paul wasn't even in new orleans then & he wasn't stuffing birds w/other birds. chef paul is making money w/the idea tho. i can't dispute that at all.
i can't begrudge him it either. in the world of cooking, so many ideas get passed around, added to, subtracted from that any ur-turducken receipe wouldn't be accessible any more. still, one did exist prior to chef paul's emergence. it's a small thing but at least my blood pressure will return to normal.
can i have my gall bladder back?
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