Carving out his niche

The Observer polled his fellow males of the species last week on the following existential question: Is there a graceful way to remove a leg from a turkey? The general consensus was no.

It's easy as pie, according to carving primers, yet many of us expend great effort trying to separate the damned thing and all too often end up yanking it off, our faces a mottled mauve, like crazed combatants in World Extreme Fighting.

There are, I suppose, occasions when a man faces more pressure than carving a Thanksgiving turkey -- trying to hit a slider in front of a crowd maybe -- but not many. July Fourth grill duty pales next to carving duty. There is no other ritual in the year when one's manhood is so publicly at stake.

That's because, even more than Christmas, Thanksgiving draws in-laws, strays, and complete strangers like flies. So the carver can have 30 sets of eyes on him when he stands alone at the head of the table.

All conversation dies when he picks up his weapons. The festive warmth that filled the room moments earlier is replaced by a merciless judgment that records every failure of knife work like points lost in a troubled double axel at the winter Olympics.

On a bad day, the white meat comes off the bird in divots. The dark meat - where is that pesky dark meat - is reluctant to leave the bone. Whatever the carver does, there are stage whispers: "That's not the right way to carve a turkey, for God's sake." And: "Honey, shall I show him how to do it?"

The carver must labor on in the face of this hostility. There is nowhere to hide. He couches his embarrassment in banter, but no one is fooled. And, of course, said carver cannot retort, "Okay, big mouth, you do it" without moving to Chad in disgrace.

A stalwart of self improvement, the Observer searched the Net last week for carving instructions and found the same ones on three different websites. I was flabbergasted to learn you're supposed to remove the legs first. Who knew? I mud-wrestle one off only when someone demands it.

Many of us have searched in vain for the magic spot that allows the effortless separation of the leg from the body. Imagine my irritation to find the instructions blithely stating, "The leg should move easily and the joint connecting the leg to the body may even snap free without cutting."

Oh really? What planet are you on?

Most of us, I also learned, carve white meat wrong. We slice obliquely down and out from the top of the bird. Bad, bad, bad. What we should do, once the odious legs are off, is slice horizontally into the bone at the bottom of the white meat shelf and then cut slices vertically down: "All of the slices will stop at the horizontal cut, allowing for even slices."

This may be beyond the edge of my envelope, but I'll give it a try on Thursday. For the record, screwing up with a regular knife is still classier than going with a low-rent electric one. And don't talk to me about the dreaded knife people. The brother-in-law of a colleague brings his own knives , like a pool hustler his cue stick, when he attends a Thanksgiving away game at the home of certain relatives.

The whole turkey thing can get a bit much. Take the turducken, a fad of Cajun origin where a boneless chicken is put into a boneless duck that goes into a boneless turkey. This is the culinary equivalent of the canine Labradoodle.

The carving fixation got me all het up to eyeball a turkey up close and personal, so I motored out to Owen's Poultry Farm in Needham, where they've been selling the creatures for three generations. Think 4,000 this Thanksgiving. They keep some White Hollands in a cage for gawkers like me to examine.

Turkeys are the damnedest things. Their ugliness is sublime, but their gobbling -- only the guys gobble -- would have me in four-point restraints in about 11 minutes. The Hollands have none of the weird dignity of the wild turkey I recently watched strut down my street in Jamaica Plain, his GPS navigation system apparently haywire. Now there's a player.

The male -- a Tom to all you yahoos -- has, among other strange things, a blue head festooned with unattractive red bumps called caruncles. If this sounds like an acid flashback, it gets better. Turkeys' heads change colors when they get excited. FYI: June, for reasons that ecape me, is National Turkey Lovers' Month.

Donny Owen out in Needham tells me his price per pound is $2.95, up 20 cents from last year. That's $75 for a 25-pound turkey. He doesn't worry. His parking lot was full at 9:15 last Wednesday morning with people eager to pay large for a good bird.

But I'm also a fan of Eileen Nee, whom I met at Roche Brothers in West Roxbury. She has been buying frozen Thanksgiving turkeys there for 59 cents a pound for ages. Roche Brothers also carries turkeys from Bell & Evans -- the outfit that supplies the White House -- but Eileen, a registered dietitian, is fine with the less expensive one.

She says this in a moment of unbreachable serenity: "There's no reason not to get it."

Sam Allis's e-mail address is allis@globe.com.