The concept of matryoshka-style holiday roasts can stretch further out of the mainstream into relative gastronomic wilds, where history and legend hold a few smoldering lessons. The key to the success of a turducken is the duck. Its essence diffuses through the surrounding layers of stuffing to saturate its inherently less delicious comrades -- the chicken within, the turkey without -- with spurts of fat and heady flavor. Replacing the turkey with its opposite -- a silken, grease-spitting goose -- yields a gooducken, a much richer endeavor naturally quite beloved in England. I like the idea of losing the unctuous goose, retaining the turkey, and adding a fourth bird, perhaps even a fifth -- maybe a wee quail, petite and boneless, buried down in the depths, folded up around a hard-boiled egg, a single chestnut, or a minature wad of stuffing, and then, for the outermost layer, the fifth, an entire emu. Imagine that, an emurckenail. I'm not sure how emu -- fine-grained and somewhat beefy -- would jive with all that paler stuff but someone -- probably not me -- should find out.

After a brief bit of research, my fantasy was steam-rolled by a rough and very real bird-iathon slouching out of the past. The largest recorded "nested" bird roast, or Rôti Sans Pareil took place at a royal feast in France in the early 19th century, and involved a breath-taking 17 feathery creatures, all boned and stuffed into one another, in order, from smallest -- a six-inch-long Garden Warbler with a solitary olive squeezed into its tiny empty cavity -- to largest, a huge, currently semi-endangered terrestial bird with a wingspan of seven feet called a bustard. Fifteen other birds -- a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, and an Ortolan Bunting -- were pressed, skin to gut, between those two extremes.

What's more, Richard Sterling gave a pretty famous and utterly silly account of a chef friend's even heftier undertaking in his book The Fearless Diner:

"I knew in my gut, in my gastronomic soul, that what I had long hoped was true. That it wasn't just some wild traveler's tale designed to stir the imagination and not the pot. The ultimate cookout was a reality. The only thing that could possibly be greater would be to spit-roast a giant squid. My wildest culinary dream could come true. Sven, Allah bless him and may his tribe increase, had done it. 'I tell you no lie,' he went on, sipping a cold one. 'They wanted camel. I roasted a whole camel on a spit.' 'Yes!' I cried. 'Tell me everything.' And he did. He told me how he stuffed the camel with six sheep, stuffed the sheep with chickens, and the chickens with fish. He told me how it took 24 hours to cook, and that he served it on a silver platter in the shape of a recumbent camel. He related how the tribesmen who were the sheik's guests then attacked it with their knives en masse, feasted with their bare hands, and ate the meat down to the ivory."

turducken cross-section photo by ryan farr If, for you, after all that, mere turducken will still do come November 26th, you can savor it without shelling out for shipping or expending any effort beyond tending the oven. While supplies last, Ryan Farr of the esteemed 4505 Meats is working the local turducken angle, selling 20 pound behemoths -- free range, organic, and stuffed to the hilt with cornbread-sausage dressing -- for $250 apiece, available for order and subsequent pick-up in Potrero Hill. The stuffing between the layers will be made of chicken-and-duck sausage and cornbread. Yours will arrive in a roasting pan, on a bed of root vegetables and herbs, with an electric thermometer and alarm probe already inserted.

Slip him an extra twenty and maybe he'll put a quail in there too.

turduckenturducken

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