#ThatTranslatorCanCook Week Ten: Turkey Blanquette

This week I actually decided to tackle two recipes at once, because they seemed like they would pair well together. To find out what the second recipe is, you’ll have to wait for next week’s blog (once it’s up, I’ll link it here). But firstly, blanquette de dinde…

Translation
The translation of this recipe was actually fairly straightforward, apart from the title of the dish itself! I think the most common type of this dish is actually blanquette de veau and normally the French is used to refer to it. When I googled ‘blanquette’, I came up with this definition: ‘ a dish consisting of white meat in a white sauce’, so I did consider calling it ‘turkey in white sauce’. However, upon closer inspection of the source text, it appeared that the sauce made was not a traditional white sauce, so in the end I opted for ‘turkey blanquette’.

Other than that, I noticed once again that the recipe was very sparse (more on that in the cooking section) – no chopping was mentioned neither in the ingredients list nor in the method.

Cooking
This recipe was relatively easy to follow, though, because I was cooking two unknown recipes at the same time, I was a little stressed, especially as they involved three pans between them!

My first issue came when I realised I’d actually forgotten to buy a bouquet garni to add to the turkey as it stewed in chicken stock (the French actually called for un bouillon de volaille, but as we don’t get ‘poultry stock cubes’ in the UK, I substituted a chicken stock cube), so I substituted a stick of celery, as that is also a flavour enhancer.

I was also unsure as to how long to stew it for. The recipe said one hour, but as I was only cooking half of the recipe, I was unsure if I should halve the cooking time. In the end, I cooked it for about 45 minutes, while I completed the other steps of the recipe.

My only other slight issue was when to cook the mushrooms. The recipe seemed to suggest actually cooking them in the blanquette sauce once you’d made it. However, I normally prefer to cook my mushrooms first in a very small amount of oil. This is because they release a lot of moisture themselves and I don’t want them to get too soggy. If I were to revise the translation of the recipe now, I would add this step, as well as adding steps to chop up all of the vegetables before you start cooking.

Overall, this recipe worked very well and was absolutely delicious! I was very pleased with the result.

My husband, James’ verdict: ‘F*cking delicious!’

Next week: Come back next Friday to find out what the second mystery part of my cooking ventures this week!