The holiday turkey farm

by Haig Krikorian

Published: Friday November 20, 2009 in Food

Berkeley, Calif. - In the fall of 1967 in Beirut, my father, Aram Krikorian, together with his favorite cousin Nazelie Krikorian, my Aunty Naze, decided to buy turkeys from a farm and fatten them for the holidays.

The venture started with my father going to a local turkey farm, buying a few turkeys, and bringing them over to Aunty Naze's house. She had a bit more space (a nice-size garden with a water lily pond versus our apartment building with two balconies) to begin the two-month-long process of feeding the turkeys fattening foods.

Well, my father's experience with this process was based on someone telling him that you feed the bird walnuts and those oily walnuts will fatten the bird and make the flesh tastier for the dinner.

Aram had lived in Baghdad for quite a few years, and there the family had a garden where a variety of animals were raised, from dogs to gazelles to exotic birds. But the care of these animals was done by the gardener and other miscellaneous workers. So, basically, his knowledge of animal husbandry was very limited or nonexistent.

So here he was faced with the task of getting the main course of the Christmas dinner ready for the many family members that got together to celebrate Christmas and New Year's with us. Of course he didn't have to raise a finger for any of the cooking of the turkey, or any component of the rest of the meal, but he was in charge of delivering the turkey to his wife and all the other women who worked on this meal for days.

Easy as pie, you have the turkey and you have the walnuts, so what's the big deal? He went and found a store that sold walnuts, and he bought three sacks, 25 lbs. each, and headed back to Naze's.

There were the turkeys. He opened the first bag of walnuts and put them in the middle of the cackling birds and walked away, returning a few hours later to find that not a single piece of walnut was touched. He immediately called his friend and told him the situation, and his advisor told him, "Well, if that's the case then you will need to force feed them the nuts, just like they do with ducks and geese to fatten their livers."

So there it was, the solution. He went back to the makeshift pen, ran after the first available turkey, grabbed it, and brought it out of the pen to the bench nearby where he had a bag of nuts. He forced open its beak and started shoving walnuts into the bird. The bird went out of control, waving its wings at an incredible speed and releasing itself finally from Aram's hands and running like a crazy person all over Naze's yard. So out came Naze in a panic to see what was going on, and she noticed the bird running around her yard with a huge lump in its throat. She screeched out to Aram, "What are you doing?!" at which point he explained to her that he was following the instructions of his friend who had told him to force feed the turkeys walnuts. As she got nearer and nearer to the bird, she realized that Aram had bought whole walnuts with the hard shell on and was trying to make the bird swallow the nut whole.

Being the older and wiser of the two, Naze patiently took hold of the turkey and with quite a bit of difficulty dislodged the walnut from the turkey's throat, and pushed it back in the pen.

"Aram," she said, "feeding the birds walnuts is a grand idea, but next time try shelling them!"

So here is the recipe for the roast turkey. Turkey was a foreign dish in Armenian and Middle Eastern cuisine, but somehow it found its way into our kitchens over the years. In Arabic the name for turkey is "deek al habash"; in Armenian it's "hntkahav." Both names prove the point that these dishes are not indigenous to the cultures. Deek al habash means bird from Abyssinia; hntkahav, of course, means Indian chicken.

But, regardless, the medzmammas and aunts always found ways to make their dishes Armenian, or Lebanese-­Armenian in our case. So here's one from the old country.

Nene's turkey

6 cups chopped onion (about 1 large)
8 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1½ teaspoons minced garlic
1 tbsp. chopped fresh herbs (thyme, oregano, marjoram)
Salt and ground black pepper
1 turkey, around 14 lbs

Pat dry the bird, inside and out, with a paper towel. Remove the neck, liver, and gizzards.

Salt and pepper the inside cavity, as well as the outside of the bird, really well.

Place in a roasting pan.

Place in a 375 degree Fahrenheit oven and roast for one hour.

Add 2 cups of water to the pan and reduce the temperature of the oven to 325 degrees.
Roast for an additional 3.5 hours.

Remove from the oven and check with a meat thermometer for an internal temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

Let sit for 20 minutes, then drizzle the turkey with the lemon juice and the chopped herbs.
Serve with rice.