Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer, are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown. This week Peter writes:
At the risk of sounding like those obnoxious retailers who begin with Christmas promotions before Halloween, I’d like to talk about turkeys. This is largely prompted by our having begun letting our young turkeys out-of-doors for the first time several weekends ago to graze on pasture. They are now large enough that we don’t have to fear aerial predators like the red tailed hawk. But as we learned to our dismay a few summers ago, leaving them out at night, to roost in the apple trees, as we once did, is no longer an option. not after walking into their pasture compound one morning and finding 19 decapitated, bloodied bodies, and a very traumatized flock of survivors. That only the heads were eaten probably suggests the work of a horned owl, known for favoring the brains of its prey, (apparently a racoon is also a possible culprit since they also favor the head). What ever it was, it apparently took 19 turkeys to make a meal. It is not many barnyard critters that take one back to the palace of Montezuma. But this is the case with the turkey, which like the tomato, potato, and tobacco, to name a few, is a New World food. When Cortez and other Spanish explorers reached Central America and Mexico in the early 1500’s they encountered large flocks of domesticated and wild turkeys. In particular, Montezuma, ruler of the Aztecs kept flocks of black, brown, red, and white turkeys in his palace aviary in Mexico City. Apparently it was principally for its feathers, used for the court ceremonial robes and other ritual uses, that the Aztecs prized the turkey. Between 1500 and 1519 turkeys were first taken to Spain; by 1520 they had reached Italy; by 1538 they were in France; and found in England by 1541. By the middle of the sixteenth century, a hundred years before the First Thanksgiving in Plymouth, it is known that turkey was a feature of European holiday feasts and weddings, and by 1570 turkey recipes appeared in print. Amazingly within a century of its discovery the turkey had become an international phenomenon. Turkeys completed their trans-Atlantic roundtrip when they arrived with the English colonists who founded Jamestown. It is not known whether their 1619 "thanksgiving feast" included turkeys on the menu. When that ill-fated enterprise came to its unfortunate end, it is probable that any remaining turkeys escaped into the wild, introducing the genes from Central America and Mexican varieties into the Eastern wild turkey population.
It is known that by 1629 European domesticated turkeys were taken to Massachusetts.This was, it should be noted, over 100 years after the bird had been introduced into Europe. "According to contemporaneous records, "wild fowl" (folklore says "turkey") was served as the main course at the first Thanksgiving celebration at Plymouth Colony. If indeed, they feasted on turkey it may not have been wild turkey, as is commonly assumed, but the domestic version brought from Europe. Interestingly, long before the Puritans reached Plymouth Rock, turkey was associated in the European mind with festive celebrations. It is known that in early colonial times, varieties of turkeys bred by the Europeans, such as the White Holland, the Norfolk Black, and the Spanish Black, were brought to the Eastern seaboard. These European strains were smaller than the Eastern wild turkeys that the colonists encountered. They, therefore crossed their domesticated breed with the wild birds to produce larger and more vigorous turkey stocks. It is by this circuitous route that today’s American turkey breeds have come down to us. By the 1800’s most American farmers kept small flocks of turkeys as a seasonal crop. They were valued not just as food but also as a form of pre-pesticide pest control, particularly in the tobacco producing areas of Virginia. Additionally, their feathers were valued for fans, dusters, garments and quill pens. In contrast to today, they were then not just a holiday meal but were found on tables year round. As one English traveler wrote in 1780: “”At dinners, there are frequently four or five turkies on the table…I will mention that I do not recollect to have dined a single day from my arrival in America, til I left Virginia without a turkey on the table.”
Through a slow process of selective breeding during the nineteenthcentury other varieties of turkeys were added to the original white Holland and Norfolk and Spanish black varieties. The black varieties when crossed with wild birds became the foundation for today’s Bronze, Narragansett, and Slate varieties. The Narragansett turkey is named for Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, where it was developed, and descends from crossing wild birds with Norfolk Blacks. Another variety, the Bourbon Red (above), was bred in the late 1800’s in Bourbon County in Kentucky’s Bluegrass region by J.F. Barbee, who created it by crossing Buff, Bronze, and White Holland turkeys. (Thus it is an amusing anachronism when the film “Gone With the Wind” opens with a flock of Bourbon Reds—above—scampering across the lawn of Tara just prior to the Civil War. Scarlett, as usual, was ahead of her time.) Another breed, the Royal Palm (the black-and-white beauties at top), a small sized but strikingly beautiful turkey, was a late comer first appearing as a genetic sport in the 1920’s on the farm of Enoch Carson of Lake Worth, Florida.
We at Turkana Farms are focused on raising Bourbon Reds, Narragansetts (above left),and Spanish Blacks (above right), and, occasionally include Royal Palms and Blue Slates in our flocks. These varieties together with those mentioned above are now known as Heritage Turkeys. It was these varieties, raised on small farmsteads, that prior to World War II, filled the culinary and holiday needs of American households. And then, sad to say, something happened, something of a momentous nature, which would turn out to be one of the most transforming moments in the evolution of the domesticated turkey. But, like all good story tellers, I cannot tell you about it now but ask you to tune in next time for that sad chapter. Or if you can't wait, you can find much of the information from which this article and the next one will be drawn in Birds of a Feather: Saving Rare Turkeys from Extinction, by Carolyn J. Christman and Robert O. Hawes, published by the American Breeds Conservancy in `1999. —Peter Davies
