It is that time of year again to be thinking about jamming as many family members as a house can hold and the best part of the day: Thanksgiving dinner. Of course everyone thinks of the usual turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing and all that other good stuff but does anyone remember the turducken?
Former Oakland Raiders coach and NFL commentator John Madden sure would not let anyone forget about turduckens. Madden was known for working the Thanksgiving Day games for CBS and Fox and would award turkeys or turduckens to the winning team. He is known for bringing a turducken onto a 1997 Thanksgiving football broadcast and started carving it and it is all history from there.
Turduckens sound completely crazy, glutenous and probably extremely good if he had teams eating it every year. It is just a duck stuffed into a turkey with maybe stuffing on the inside of it. That was not weird at all for Madden and they even became part of his annual tradition. He proudly considers himself an eater and knows just what and how much of all food should be served on the special day as he told the Chicago Tribune back in 2001.
“Turducken has become part of our meal, too. Turducken is a New Orleans thing we found years ago. There’s a butcher down there who makes it for us,” Madden told the Tribune. “Turducken is a deboned chicken stuffed in a deboned duck stuffed in a deboned turkey. And between the layers of meat are layers of dressing. So you slice it and you get turkey, dressing, duck, dressing, chicken. That’s really good.”
Madden put so much hype into his own love and tradition that he even got tired of it at one point. On the November 9, 2008 broadcast of NBC Sunday Night Football, he responded to a fan’s sign that read, “JOHN MADDEN, BRING BACK TURDUCKEN” and said that he was done with his obsession and that he would rather have a much more traditional turkey for the holiday.
It may be in Madden’s past now, but turduckens are things that have to be tried at least once because everyone should at least be thankful this year that someone actually created such a thing.
