The joke aside, "stuffing" a large bird with a smaller bird or birds is a cooking technique that goes back centuries. While contemporary Americans are fairly familiar with "Turducken" (a turkey stuffed with a deboned duck, which is itself (the duck) stuffed with a deboned chicken) because of NFL analyst John Madden's "shilling" for the dish when he did Thanksgiving NFL games a few years back, the Wikipedia article on turducken:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turducken
notes that "bird stuffed with smaller bird(s)" recipes go back to at least as far as 1807, and allegedly were done as far back as ancient Rome:
Quote:
In his 1807 Almanach des Gourmands, gastronomist Grimod de La Reynière presents his rôti sans pareil ("roast without equal")—a bustard stuffed with 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, an ortolan bunting and a garden warbler—although he states that, since similar roasts were produced by ancient Romans, the rôti sans pareil was not entirely novel.
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Nothing like a little learning for the first morning of the holiday season.
Cheers,
bcg