In Search of the Turducken

With the holidays approaching, you might already have a 20-pound turkey taking over your icebox. Or maybe your family of four prefers chicken or duck.

But why not all three?

Why stop at one bird, when you could put one meaty matryoshka inside the other inside the other? Why have a normal meal when you could … just not? Self-described as turducken-curious, I’ve wanted answers to these exact questions.

To preface, I consume little meat aside from chicken. And when I do, I prefer my meat deeply abstracted from the animal as a whole: on a skewer, in a tender, or swimming in a sauce. So the turducken is a monstrosity I will never eat and hopefully never meet. And yet, I am enraptured by the turducken. It consumes my thoughts (and now my social media feed) and inspires dreams of the perfect trio Halloween costume.

So I went in search of the turducken: what it is, how it is, and perhaps most importantly, why it is.

If you can’t decipher the portmanteau, a turducken is a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey (all boneless and all desecrated). Although most people have heard of the turducken, this dish is, on the whole, an enigma. There are no official statistics on America’s turducken consumption. It’s nearly impossible to find a pre-made turducken outside of Louisiana. And, when I initially googled “history of turducken,” I hit numerous digital blockades, as if something fowl was at play.

The question of who invented this culinary chimera is even more difficult. While most credit Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme for creating the turducken in the late 1970s, another popular theory blames — my word, not history’s — Hebert’s Specialty Meats in Maurice, Louisiana. Hebert’s owners Junior and Sammy Hebert (pronounced “a bear”) claim to have made the dish at a customer’s special request. Even Dr. Gerald R. LaNasa, a New Orleans surgeon, has claimed to have been the first to concoct this conglomeration; I’m inclined to credit him, given the absolute detachment from blood and guts it must take to filet, pound, and insert one bird into another. But all of this, ultimately, is speculation on bird mutilation. There’s no phone number I can call, no heir to the turducken fortune I can question. I can’t look a man in the eye and ask him what ungodly impulse compelled him to see three perfectly fine meats and think, “There must be something more.”

The issue is complicated by the Europeans, who have a long history of stuffing birds inside of other birds. What a great thing to be known for! The French have their Quail à la Talleyrand — a quail inside a chicken inside a turkey — which dates back to the 1890s, as well as the Rôti Sans Pareil (literally “Roast without Equal”): 17 (count ’em! 17!) increasingly smaller birds — and an anchovy — stuffed inside a bustard. And of course, the English have their gooducken, which is exactly what it sounds like — goose, duck, chicken. One of the only sources on the gooducken is Chompasaurus, which describes the dish as capable of making “baby Jesus cry.”

This practice of engastration — the cooking technique of stuffing one animal’s remains into another — transcends cultural, temporal, and geographical boundaries. Since the Middle Ages, people across the globe have produced gems such as TurBacon, Kiviak, and even the Bedouin Wedding Feast: a camel stuffed with a lamb stuffed with 20 chickens. As part of this long lineage of engastration, the turducken may have no individual progenitor.

But if not what or who, then how? No, not how to make the turducken — there are plenty of recipes online with photos that feel more medical than culinary — but how has the turducken captured our attention and imagination? From what we know, the turducken was largely unknown until December 1, 1996, when Louisiana butcher Glenn Mistich hand-delivered the all-in-one feast to sports commentator John Madden at the Superdome. Madden was immediately hooked, supposedly devouring the entire flock with his bare hands while announcing a New Orleans Saints game. While consuming the turducken, Madden also allegedly said, “Daf a greaf prlay fromf Domsbrowfki.”

From that point on, Madden praised the turducken on the air every Thanksgiving, explained proper carving techniques via telestrator, and named the dish the official food of the All-Madden team. Madden NFL even included The Great Turducken Feast challenge in a recent video game update. Consequently, the dish’s popularity soared, with Mistich himself selling 5,000 to 6,000 turduckens a year. The turducken would become so fundamental to Madden’s persona that his obituary in People magazine was titled “The History of John Madden and the Turducken — and How You Can Buy the Triple-Meat Dish Now.” The piece dedicates about 135 words to mourning Madden and 990 to the recent history of turducken. Though Madden and the triple meat are inextricably tied, it’s no less weird to read a sentence like this from the obituary: “‘You can’t beat a good turducken,’ Madden himself said… in what is his final public word on the now immortal dish.”

And it is here that I return to why I’m such a sucker for the turducken, the fowl inside a fowl inside a fowl that a near-vegetarian like me can’t stop thinking about. It’s not for a desire to consume or create a turducken, but to investigate it from the inside out (and out and out). And though I may not have found satisfactory answers to all my questions, I believe I’ve discovered why the turducken exists. Inherent in this vulgar practice is something telling of our society, some irrational compulsion that compels consumers to buy zucchini spiralizers or billionaires to go to space. Once we’ve done all there is to do, we long for something new; we warp our veggies, build rocket ships, and stuff one bird inside another. There must always be something new to conquer, a new world record to break. Perhaps the desire to own that history or to die with it as your legacy is just as human.

Or maybe the Turducken is simply absurd. And maybe we will never know who, what, or how the turducken is… the turducken. But maybe the reason I love the turducken as a concept is because it is so utterly stupid and yet so quintessentially human.