A platter of turducken can substitute for the traditional turkey on the groaning Thanksgiving table. This elaborate dish made famous by New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme consists of a boned chicken inside in a boned duck inside a boned turkey, the empty spaces crammed with figs, bread stuffing, or a sausage force meat and the whole roasted until glistening brown.
For those of you who are wondering what on earth this has to do with a nursery rhyme, don’t sign off yet, because I can vouch for my credentials as a rhyme finder. Before the publication of James Orchard Halliwell’s The Nursery Rhymes of England (1840), I swear that the ditties are more likely to be found in bawdy plays, descriptions of rambles around London, and nasty political satires than anthologies for children, which are not especially numerous before 1860. Lowlifes and servants are more likely to repeat them than ladies and gentlemen.
I made this discovery trying to verify Iona and Peter Opie’s claim in the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes that the earliest printed appearance of “The House that Jack Built” was in Nurse Truelove’s New-Year’s-Gift (1750). Being a long accumulative rhyme, different searches using various combinations of distinctive words had to be run. Nothing new had turned up on previous attempts, but this time a 1707 translation of the Spanish novel Estevanillo Gonzales, the Most Arch and Comical of Scoundrels, popped up and I thought it was a really promising hit. 
Indeed it was!
In one of his escapades, the hero was hired on the strength of his assurance that he was the best cook in the army. Here is the passage where he gives the recipe for “Imperial Stuffed Meat,” a more elaborate version of turducken, explaining to his audience:
It is just like the Tale the Children tell of, This is the Stick that Beat the Dog, the Dog that bit the Cat, the Cat that kill’d the Mouse, the Mouse that eat the Malt, the Malt that lay in the House that Jack Built; for this Egg is in the Pidgeon, the Pidgeon is to be put into a Partridge, the Partridge into a Pheasant, the Pheasant into a Pullet, the Pullet into a Capon, the Capon into a Turkey, the Turkey into a Kid, the Kid into a Sheep, the Sheep into a Calf, and the Calf into a Cow, all these Creatures are to be Pull’d, Flea’d [i.e. flayed], and Larded, except the Cow, which is to have her Hide on, and as they are thrust one into another like a Nest of Boxes.
A dish fit for an emperor’s coronation after four hours’ roasting in a covered trench, brags Estevanillo. The 1707 recipe is rather similar to the one called the “Roti sans pareil” in the 1807 Almanach des gourmands, cited by today’s foodies as the earliest reference. But curiously enough, the 1707 edition was the only one of all the reprints I found elsewhere to include the reference to “The House that Jack Built”…
In the early 1890s, Beatrix Potter was chafing at her lack of independence and decided to try earning some money by selling drawings of anthropomorphized animals to publishers Ernest Nister or Hildesheimer & Faulkner, German-based firms known for high-quality color printing. She realized 7 shillings and 6 pence in 1892 from the sale of this highly finished drawing of Peter Rabbit opening the front door and discovering a large wicker basket filled with carrots and turnips (or perhaps rutabagas) on the snowy step. Signed “H. B. P.” in tiny initials in the lower right, it first appeared in a medley of pictures on the cover drawings on Nister’s Changing Pictures [1893] and as the frontispiece to Nister’s Isn’t It Funny [1894], both of which are in the collection. There is a preparatory sketch of this scene in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
May there be a surprise on your porch this Christmas morning!
