One note on Renaissance Faires: I’ve been to a bunch and worked at a few, and the food is typically… mediocre at best, with the exception of the Sterling Renaissance Festival in upstate NY. Besides being a beautiful site with actual well built structures and top notch performers, they bring in some terrific food and tons of craft breweries. It’s a gourmet renfest.
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Would you say you have approximately 30-50 wild turkeys filing through your hay field right how?
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About two hundred-ish years, if you trust that Marco Polo fake news.
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How am I supposed to protect my family, if not with a semi-automatic baster?
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A brief timeline of renfair turkey legs and their origins:
Early 1500s: Turkeys imported to Europe from America
1500s-early 1600s: Turkeys bred as herd animals by the British, Portuguese, and Spanish, becoming a popular feasting-meal centerpiece (along with peacocks, swans, capons and even partridge pie). It was a big favorite at the early-1500s court of Henry VIII.
Early 1700s: European domesticated farm-bred turkeys are re-imported to America, and also become popular as poultry livestock and as an American feast-day dish. (Though at first, mostly at Christmas.)
1933: Charles Laughton sears the image of Henry VIII wielding a turkey leg into the popular consciousness while starring in The Private Life of Henry VIII (for which he won the Best Actor Oscar)
1968: Educator Phyllis Patterson stages a radio-station fundraiser in her Laurel Canyon back yard, featuring a a Commedia dell’Arte wagon and performers and vendors in tights’n’tunics. This eventually morphs into the Living History Center’s Renaissance Pleasure Faire, the first and largest of the American RenFairs. The RPF was set in Elizabethan England, notionally at a regional market fair in the village of Chipping-Under-Oakwood, on the day the Queen and her court come to visit while on Progress.
The turkey-leg booth at the LHC’s RPF was one of its earliest and most reliable food vendors. Munching on a big ol’ BBQd turkey leg made the crowd feel very period-appropriate (thank you, Charles Laughton!), so they were a big hit.
Early-70s onward: other fairs inspired by the LHC faires sprang up over time, also mostly patterned (albeit sometimes rather loosely!) on the RPF, thus mimicking both its English Renaissance setting and its popular booth foods. Turkey legs have become almost emblematic of renfair itself, so almost all renfairs now have them.
It is actually a really excellent fair-food: hand held, every customer is a walking advertisement, the smell of the bbq is a lure, it’s a simple one-item-only booth, easy to cook ahead and hold, and the raw material is incredibly cheap - even more so then than now - so it’s got good margins even at affordable prices. And even though a turkey-leg booth at a regional market fair would be an odd thing to find in the actual English Renaissance, they still did have turkeys, so it’s arguably period. (-:
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So it was the trendy food of its time. Renfair participants should reflect this by looking at the turkey legs and saying something every time like “Oh, I read about these…”
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Doesn’t seem “trendy” to me. Just taking a new domesticable species and actually breeding it in numbers and making it a staple food.
When I look at German supermarkets, turkey is one of the main meat birds, second only to chicken. Especially when looking at unfrozen meats. Duck and goose are virtually always frozen, quail too. Ostrich is rare, usually frozen.
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It was what we call a “joke”. I’m sure turkey seemed perfectly novel to the foodies among the nobility, back when it was new to them, people being people.
I’m sure your experience at the supermarket in this century is identical to Henry VIII, who when presented with a new dish said, “It is just more food in a different shape, let us eat it without humour or interest. It is all just food, after all.” This another “joke”. Henry VIII had no opinion about German supermarkets.
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