Tacchino

Though not as usual in Italian cooking, turkeys are the largest and most widely used species of domesticated birds in the United States. Relatives of the grouse, most turkeys raised for food are descended from the Wild Turkey, which is native to many parts of North America. A second species, the Ocellated Turkey, has been domesticated in the past and is native to the forest regions of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula; they were introduced to Europe through Spanish conquistadors, and to North America by early English colonists. Crossbreeding between Ocellated and native Wild Turkeys resulted in “the foundation stock of modern American breeds” (Christian Teubner, Sybil Gräfin Schönfeldt, and Siegfried Scholtyssek, The Chicken and Poultry Bible: The Definitive Sourcebook).