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As you know by now, most of my cooking acumen I received from my grandmother who may have been the first Betty Crocker, or as far as I was concerned she was. I hope you found her recipe for cornbread and cornbread dressing helpful if you’d never made it before but one thing Grandmother never taught me was how to slice a baked turkey. Actually I can’t even cut up a small chicken that the parts are recognizable. I can manage to get the legs and wings off but the rest of the bird just looks mangled to say the least. I know Grandmother cut up chickens herself and I think she even wrung their necks when Granddaddy got ready for a Sunday dinner of fried chicken but she never sliced the turkey, Granddaddy always did that and later on my daddy did the honors. Pat never took over that duty actually or maybe he did slice up enough breast meat for us to have but he never got into dismembering the big old bird.

I don’t know why I find the cutting of the turkey so daunting but I feel like I am in a greasy wrestling match by the time I hack away on the bird for about 30 minutes. Again, I understand and can manage to slice up the nice white juicy meat and I know to let the turkey ‘rest’ for about 30 minutes after it leaves the oven and I know this not because anyone told me to do that or that I read it but I know that because after having a good bit of white meat crumbling rather than slicing because it was too hot, I thought I’d work on the wings and legs. The wings as I said are fairly easy to disconnect. At first I grabbed hold and pull it away from the body and then twisted like the devil and when it didn’t come off, I got out the big knife. I hack and hack and can never find that little place between the bone and the body where you can actually run the knife through and get it off. I try hacking really hard on that gristly bone and finally I get it off with the help of a small hammer. Then I do the same with the other wing. The drumstick is the next logical body part to get off the bird. It is not so hard but this is where I learned that the turkey should ‘rest’ and cool, cool being the big deal here and because I didn’t know better a long time ago, I put the drumstick aside and I reached into the bird with one hand, knife in the other in my quest for the hidden thigh. Getting the thigh off is another matter because I don’t even readily see where it is connected to the body of the bird. Only one of us in our original family likes the dark meat so I am not fearful of not getting big nice slices of the thigh meat; it doesn’t have to be sliced pretty like the breast meat.

Well I got into that thigh meat with both hands just trying to locate it and get a handful of it so I could cut it away but before I did that, I burned the heck out of my hands, both of them. Duh, the inside of the turkey the closest to the bone takes longer to cool! Well I know it now, but not the first time. However knowing that fact I still sometimes burn my fingers but by the time I got the thigh out it looked like Tillie the Turkey had had an appendectomy performed by a first year med student using a chain saw. What a mess but I thought I ought to get rid of the extraneous parts before I tried to slice any more white meat. For those who love the dark meat the sort of slippery part makes it hard for me to deal with it and hard to slice. I usually end up cutting not slicing the dark meat and have a pretty nice pile of unattractive hunks of dark meat for all my effort and burned fingers.

I like to bake my turkey the day before so that I get all of this yucky stuff done before the guests arrive. What a mess and I ended up this time just like I usually do with a bigger pile of meat for the dogs than for the turkey platter. The turkey had that really pretty dark and crusty look as it came out of the oven but I couldn’t even think of taking it to the dinner table for dismembering. I guess I could have taken a picture of it and passed it around to our guests to see how nicely it had cooked. I saved some of the pan drippings not only for the dressing and the gravy but a bit to sprinkle over the turkey that would be warmed in the oven just before noon time and kept it nice and juicy and warm.

Pat came in about the time I was disposing of the carcass or what was left of it and asked me if I had used the chainsaw to cut it up as it looked a lot like I might have but I said no I used the sharpest knife I had in the drawer and a hammer to get the thigh bone out. It was quite an ordeal and worse than usual because it was a 20 pounder this year as we expected about 17 people.

Do any of you remember the Turkey Festival we had some years ago? There was a contest to see who would be selected the Turkey Queen that year. I heard there weren’t many entrants so I decided to enter myself. You had to write a short essay about why you would like to be the Turkey Queen. I wrote two essays and wouldn’t you know they were the only two entries, so I beat myself once and won the title with the second entry. You’d think the first Turkey Queen of Blanco County would know or learn how to cut up a turkey and had that been the thing to win the title I could never have won. I have a couple of memories of that event. The first was that one of the radio guys from Austin was the master of ceremonies and when I appeared to be introduced to the crowd, Bama Brown who looked pretty silly himself as he was dressed like Ben Franklin, said to the crowd, "I’d like to introduce the new Turkey Queen, Cynthia Smith of Johnson City and would you look at the drumsticks on the turkey queen!" The other memory was that I rode in Cubby Hudler’s convertible around the square with my homemade tiara, and a basket of turkey feathers to throw to the crowd. The bad part was that Cubby had just had his car detailed for the event and the turkey feathers stuck all over the inside of his car! Somehow the Turkey Festival didn’t last but two more years, I wonder where my crown is now? Gobble, gobble.