John Madden extolled the virtues of it during Thanksgiving Day NFL football telecasts when he worked for Fox. Despite the fact I've lived in southeast Texas for most of my life, last Christmas was the first time I finally got to taste one.
What I'm talking about is a turducken. It's a partially deboned turkey stuffed with a deboned duck which is stuffed with a small deboned chicken. Whatever hollow spaces are left are usually stuffed with either Cajun sausage, dirty rice, or Cajun style stuffing depending on who you get the bird from. The result is a multilayered piece of meat that you cook by either grilling, baking, roasting, or barbecuing it.
The turducken can't be Cajun deep fried because you need the hollow space inside for the bird to cook evenly
The turducken is thought to be Cajun in origin, but peeps in east Texas and northern Louisiana claim it originated there. A November 2005 National Geographic article gives credit for the idea to brothers Sammy and Junior Hebert, who invented them in 1985 at their family meat market in Maurice, LA and have been selling them commercially ever since. The turducken tradition is growing and the Hebert stores (one in Maurice, three in Houston and one in Tulsa, Okla.) sell over 10,000 turduckens per year. Increasingly they are being sold not just for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners, but for Easter and other holidays as well.
Whoever came up with the idea, it's tasty eating and I'm looking forward to chowing down on it for our upcoming Christmas dinner.
