Edible Traditions
A TURKEY SO GOOD, YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHERE IT CAME FROM By Christopher Lloyd Photos By Kelley Jordan Heneveld
Every Thanksgiving turkey makes the inevitable journey from showstopping dinner table centerpiece to refrigerated leftovers to sandwich scraps and maybe to soup stock, but always ending in the same place: the household garbage. In the Indianapolis home of Bob and Beth Groves, though, the turkey starts out in the trashcan. Trashcan turkey, a decidedly unorthodox cooking method with a small but staunch group of devotees, is how the Groves put the heat to their meat at Thanksgiving for the past 15 years. Every November they cook two 20-plus-pound birds in old-fashioned metal trashcans for their family feast, which averages around 35 very eager eaters. Using just a steel can, metal stake, aluminum foil and 40 pounds of charcoal, the Groves can cook a massive turkey outdoors in two hours flat—which has the added benefit of freeing up the kitchen for preparation of side dishes. “It’s moist and it’s tender and it looks great. Everybody just seems to like it better,” Bob says. Trashcan turkey is familiar to regular attendees of the Sullivan Hardware & Garden TurkeyFest, held each year on the Saturday before
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Thanksgiving. It’s a mecca of birds grilled or deep-fried, and the Groves are there to represent the trashcan contingent every year.
WACKY, BUT IT WORKS Like beer-can chicken and other oddball poultry-cooking methods, trashcan turkey’s origins are murky, lying somewhere between hillbilly legend and improvisational camping technique. Perhaps hunters who bagged a wild bird wanted to eat it right away, and made do with whatever materials they had in their truck. Or perhaps its inception happened in an RV park, where full-size ovens were lacking. Some say it’s a Creole recipe that started in New Orleans and moved north; others claim it’s an old Boy Scout trick. It does seem that people of a technical bent are particularly drawn to the method, with its mix of ingenuity and wackiness. That’s how the Groves came across it. “I’m an engineer, I’m not a cook,” says Bob, 64, who works at Raytheon. Their son Patrick was studying at the Coast Guard Academy in 1996 when his thermodynamics instructor challenged the class to test
fall 2011
