I Praise and Give Thanks To You Palaeortyx!

I love a good ritual, especially ones that revolve around food, and especially those that involve meat! I guess it's the nerd in me that got really excited when I made the obvious connection that our most beloved bird has dinosaur ancestors.

Specifically, Palaeortyx! Palaeortyx, lived in the Eocene Epoch 56 to 34 million years ago, when another familiar order was making it's debut...stinky, dirty, fucking primates...bizarre.

Palaeortyx gave rise to an order of birds called Galliformes, which include chickens, grouse, quails, pheasants, and...drum roll please...the majestic turkey.

The pilgrims were too busy stealing from the natives to write cookbooks, but here's an American recipe for roast fowl from 1590, so it's pretty damn likely that the pilgrims would have done something along these lines:

"Prepare them to trusse; then make a farcing meat with marrow or beefe filet, with the liver of the fowle minced very small; and mix it with grated bread, the yolkes of hard eggs minced, Mace and Nutmeg beat, the tops of Thyme minced very small, and Salt; incorporate all these together with hard eggs and Verjuice, then cut the skin off the fowle betwixt the legs and the body, before it is trussed, and put in your finger to raise the skin from the flesh, but take care you break not the skin; then farce it full with this meat, and trusse the leggs close to keep in this meat; then spit them and roast them, sitting a dish under to save the gravy, which mixe with a little Claret, sliced Nutmeg, a little of that farced meat, and Salt; then give it two or three Walms on the fire, and beat it up thick with the yolk of a raw egg and a peice of Butter, with a little minc'd Lemmon and serve it up in the dish with the fowle."