CHRIS RUNDLE

HEALTHY AND VALUE FOR MONEY - CHRIS RUNDLE HAS SOME TURKEY RECIPES TO SHARE, AS WELL AS HIS THOUGHTS...

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What has this got to do with food? Well, we are talking about confusing identities. On the one hand a British personal hygiene product which is now anything but: and a bird we know as a turkey but which originated several thousand miles away to the west from the country of that name.

Turkeys were discovered in Central America by early European spice traders who rapidly realised their market potential and began to import them. However, Istanbul was their penultimate port of call before arriving in London, where dockers assumed the exotic creatures were therefore of Middle Eastern origin and referred to them as 'turkey birds'. After all, Turkey was already supplying us with equally colourful guinea fowl though, confusingly, even these came from West Africa.

And the name stuck, even travelling back across the Atlantic with the Pilgrim Fathers in 1621. They celebrated their arrival with a feast including the locally popular wild turkey though must surely have wondered how a bird capable only of limited flight managed to make it all the way from the borders of Asia ahead of them.