This is a kind of answer to the question, ‘Do they cook with turkey in Turkey?’ The normal answer is ‘not often’, and then only on New Year’s Eve in westernised families. There is, however, a traditional Ottoman desert called tavuk göğsü, apparently with ancient Roman origins, that uses shredded chicken breast. I decided to see if turkey breast would work as well.

But first let’s talk about the bird. It originated in South America, and the first Europeans who saw it thought it was a form of guineafowl—a game bird they imagined came from Turkey. So they brought it to England under the name ‘turkey fowl’. The French thought it came from India, so they called it dinde (which translates as ‘from India’). When the bird first arrived in Turkey, it was known as ‘Egyptian fowl’, but the Turks later followed the French and ‘corrected’ the name to hindi, which means ‘Indian’. In India, the bird is called peru, which is the closest to its real origin.

Anyway, the bird under any name works better than chicken in this dish, because of its bland taste, and we can safely call this a turkey pudding as well as a Turkey pudding.