“Haute for the Holidays,” by Jeffrey Steingarten, was originally published in the November 1994 issue of Vogue.

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Today we celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the most famous turkey in Franco American culinary history. I refer, of course, to the bird shot in October 1794 in the wilds of Connecticut by the great French gastronome and magistrate Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. For three years Brillat-Savarin had taken refuge from the French Revolution in an America of Edenic plenty, of sweet corn, squash, persimmons, and pumpkins, of lobsters and oysters and inexhaustible game—venison and turkeys, quail and geese, canvasback ducks and passenger pigeons, whose flocks covered the rivers and darke

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