“Hi, Big Bird,” crooned Rama the bald cockatoo from the top of his cage. “I love you, big big big big bird… SQUAWK!”
He had just caught sight of the Christmas turkey. Accustomed to being the biggest bird on the block, Rama was outraged to be confronted with a fowl so much larger and even more featherless than his corpulent self. He reared back and threatened the interloper with menace. Past caring, Tom the Turkey lay back on the roasting pan waiting his fate.
Until recently this exotic item could only be purchased in Bali from a few purveyors after placing an order, but these days frozen turkeys with little pop-up timers can even be found in our rural supermarkets. I don’t celebrate Christmas with trees, gifts, carols or cards, but am very fond of turkey. Wayan was astonished at the size and method of preparation of the festivity’s main course. After we carefully spooned my grandmother’s heritage stuffing recipe into Tom’s gaping nether regions, Wayan insisted upon doing the honours with needle and thread. “Like a doctor,” she mused.
She was distressed that I planned to roast it in the oven for hours all by itself with no sauce, and pleaded to be allowed to at least make a spicy bumbu to give it some flavour. I tried to explain that a turkey should taste like a turkey, but some concepts just can’t be translated. Roast turkey was the Canadian cultural equivalent of bebek betutu, I suggested, minus the roots and leaves. “This is strange,” Wayan declared, mentally adding it to her list of bizarre foreign domestic rituals like matching sheets and hot showers.
All afternoon the turkey slowly roasted to a golden brown, basted in its own juices. This provided plenty of time for me to try and explain how such a weird creature had found its way to my kitchen in Ubud. There were originally two species of wild turkey, one from the forests of North America and the other from the Yucatan Peninsula in Central America. The bird domesticated by the Aztecs was introduced to Spain in 1523, and three years later the first turkeys were brought to England by a Yorkshireman named William Strickland. He acquired six birds from American Indian traders on his travels and sold them for tuppence each in Bristol. Presumably someone there figured out how to breed them in captivity; turkeys are notoriously difficult to raise. (One farmer told me their thinking boxes are so small they will drop dead of fright in a thunderstorm, and drown in the rain.)
For centuries, a roast boar’s head decorated with holly and a fattened goose, swan or peacock were the main course of Christmas dinner in England. Then the turkey strutted into the kitchen, though it remained a dish for the wealthy until refrigeration became common. The word ‘turkey’ came to be used by the English in 1555 to describe this North American species, confusing it with a type of guinea fowl traded via the Ottoman Empire.
These days about 400 million turkeys a year are battery-raised in the United States in conditions we would rather not know about, although small groups of organic farmers there are now learning to breed rare varieties that were on the verge of extinction. The turkey most often bred for meat is the Big Breasted White, which is slaughtered at four months. A free-range tom (male) of this breed can reach over 20 kilograms within a year, which could be alarming. The huge breasts of these birds make it impossible for them to breed naturally; artificial insemination and incubation have replaced turkey sex. There is a whole subculture of people who manually extract turkey sperm for a living. Imagine.
Tom was finally cooked, and rested on the counter under Rama’s outraged gaze. Guests began to arrive with carefully hoarded bottles. The final half hour of preparation was frenzied; four people juggled glasses of gin as they made the gravy, carved the bird, mashed the spuds, cooked the veg, tried not to step on the excited dogs that circled underfoot and returned Rama’s glad cries of “I love you Big Bird!” while decanting the cranberry sauce, all in one small kitchen. The others made encouraging noises from the sidelines in accents from South Africa, Japan, England, Australia and Canada. Then we sat down and ate far too much turkey while tokays called overhead.
The next day my staff tasted cold roast turkey for the first time. They were not enthusiastic. “It would be better with bumbu,” Wayan pointed out politely. In a culture not given to leftovers, it was thought strange that one big bird could dominate the menu for a week and beyond. First there was turkey dinner, then hot turkey sandwiches on toast with gravy, then turkey hash, then cold turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce. At last the carcass was stripped to the bare bones to make soup. All the dogs and Rama watched this process closely, the canines positioning themselves for scraps that might fall to the floor and Rama reminding me that he was a bit of a carnivore himself. I’d learned this last year when I casually offered him a bit of turkey meat. His obsidian eyes gleaming with lust, he lunged for the tidbit and tore it from my fingers, retreated to a far corner of the cage and devoured it ravenously. Another time I offered him a raw chicken bone out of curiosity and he welcomed it, too, with feral greed. He went straight for the marrow, cheeks dripping with gore, and crunched the bone down to nothing. There seems to be a history of cannibalism in the family…
Only Tom’s gleaming bones were left once the soup was made. Because cooked bones can splinter, the dogs aren’t allowed to have them. So yet another bizarre domestic ritual has been established. All bones and other dangerous, interesting things like satay sticks are thrown onto the roof of the parking garage. This roof is at least a metre deep in a dense jungle of flowering vines that supports a whole world of insects, birds, reptiles and stray cats. Heaven knows what’s going on up there, but they never throw the bones back.
It’s been ten days since Tom’s hour of glory. The dogs still dream of turkey skin. Rama falls silent when he remembers meeting his match. And somewhere in the Midwest, next year’s Christmas dinner is not yet a gleam in the eye of the person whose job it is to facilitate the next generation of Big Birds.
