I’ve never been keen on turkey. Now my aversion is approaching outright loathing | Rachel Cooke

The Christmas bird has now been financially weaponised

I’m calling this column “Turkey, Revisited”, after “Toads, Revisited” by Philip Larkin, a poet who was most definitely not a gourmand (“I was too lazy to buy rations in London, so today has been a poached egg, macaroni & tinned spinach”). Some years ago, you see, I wrote about my dislike of the bird in one of these columns, a piece that continues occasionally to reverberate in the form of messages from readers. Riffing on an essay by the great American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten, who once tried a legendary turkey recipe whose stuffing has 32 ingredients, the piece in question detailed my adventures with a Kelly Bronze I’d mortgaged my house to buy: the baroque trumpets that played as it entered the kitchen; the spa treatments I administered to its skin; the tea towel of finest cashmere that covered it before it was carved. It also came to the conclusion that, in spite of all of the above, I had completely wasted my time. The result was … about 3kg of OK.

So why return to the subject? No, I haven’t seen the light. In fact, my aversion has since become close to outright loathing. In part, this has to do with my nature. I seem to have made up my mind about turkey, in the same way that I’ve made up my mind about Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg (this lady is not for turning, unless we’re talking about a spit with a nice bit of pork or lamb on it). I think also that I’ve grown more green down the years, and turkey is almost inevitably wasteful, no matter how many recipes for leftover korma one dutifully reads.