Luke Mackay

It looked like a giant be-legged, hairless testicle.

Our ten bird roast. A great poultry and game filled gonad. With delicious moist legs and a well seasoned forcemeat. It was AMAZING. A ten bird roast. Think on that awhile. Protein layer upon protein layer, moistness, fats and enough bird carcass to make the best gravy EVER.

Dave and I had been talking about it for years. Probably since university.

Doing our own ten bird roast (I like writing ten bird roast).

And Dave is your hunter/gatherer type and an excellent domestic sous-chef which makes him the perfect partner in crime for this kind of capon. Pffft thats a poultry joke right there. Ha! Capon. I of course meant to say caper. Oh that’s hilarious. I’m bonkers I am. Really mental. Capon?!

So off Dave popped with his big gun and cammo gear. And I went to Waitrose. And then three months later we had accumulated and deep frozen our ten birds.

And this is what they were. Turkey, chicken, duck, pheasant, grouse, poussin, pigeon, partridge, woodcock and a poxy litte quail.

So, one Sunday morning we laid out towels on Dave’s living room floor and cling-filmed the coffee table. And I undertook the butchery. Whilst watching Sky Sports for this was a MAN day. And then, with my best and sharpest knife I began the cutting. And I cut and cut and cut. I parted flesh from bone for hours- a gargantuan avian autopsy of deliciousness. And then, there they were. Our ‘layers’. Piled on top of each other, a salmonella-sullied pyramid of protein.

Whilst I undertook the cutting, Dave made the forcemeat. This involved de-skinning loads of good sausages, adding chopped apple and apricots, various herbs and spices and some bread crumbs. He also mopped the poultry juice and sweat from my brow at opportune moments and brought beer to the coffee table/abattoir.

And with that we were ready for assembly- The scrotum moment.

It is fairly straightforward. You lay the turkey out flat and lay the now boneless birds in a pile in descending order of size. Then you fill in the gaps with lovely sausage. And then you have to sew the bugger up. Which is quite time-consuming and hard. And makes you feel like Dr Frankenstein which isn’t  necessarily a bad thing. But then after all that work, finally, in all her meaty glory, there she is- sitting atop that coffee table, the Testicular Empress of Earls Court!

And into the oven she was popped after a thorough buttery massage (We were in Earls Court). All the bones and meat scraps were foisted into the largest pan at our disposal and covered with water, joined by a handful of carrots and a few onions and left to bubble away for the entire roasting time. Which was about six hours if memory serves.

And that was that. Lots of friends came round for dinner that Sunday night and we proudly wheeled our baby in. And…..

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burnt on the water. The poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that
The winds were love-sick with them;

For this magnificent bird was Cleopatra, shiny and bronzed. The aroma: heady.

And into her we carved and glory of glories, perfectly cooked, still moist and succulent and layered like a terrine- pure meat, each flavour complementing the next and all brought together by that seasoned pork. With some greens and crunchy roast potatoes and covered in that thick gamey gravy… Bird heaven.  We could have fed thirty. I think we were eight. Oh God, the sandwiches.

And that was that. We’ll do it again, no doubt. I hope so. The process and the outcome were fun and exciting and medieval. And manly dammit. We fed our women, hear us roar! Ten bird roast. Ten bird roast. Ten bird roast.