The Pope's Nose

When removing meat from my turkey carcass to make soup, I always laughingly think of my Mother referring to the bird's tail as "The Pope's Nose". My curiosity got the best of me, so I googled it and found that the phrase can be attributed to Longfellow. http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question8126.html

I hear he has a Roman nose... roamin' all over his face, it goes!

Sorry, sorry, I'll let myself out now.

When we had our first "Thanksgiving" (the Sunday before actual Thanksgiving) with our friend Karl I was carving and he surprised me by asking for the tail. I had never heard of someone actually wanting to eat the tail but he said he always had gotten the tail and it was a favorite part for him. But there was no "Pope's nose" talk probably because Karl's family was Catholic (Karl is now an Episcopalian). The term is familiar to me from Thanksgivings with my mother's family. People would joke about it but I don't know who ended up eating it.

When and where the pope's-nose expression came from, seems to me as fuzzy as a turkey feather. Wikipedia claims "parson's nose" goes back to 1400, but I don't think there were any turkeys in the English speaking world then. But there were "parsons," as the word meant parish priest then. I see another source says pope's nose dates back to the seventeenth century, which is a tempting theory as there was plenty of anti-Catholic sentiment after Henry VIII established the Anglican Church in the sixteenth century. Two centuries later Longfellow wrote at the time of the Oxford Movement in England, where Newman and others were drifting away to Catholicism from the Anglican Church and recruiting others to follow them, which stirred up even nastier anti-Catholic fervor. So even if Longfellow wasn't the first to use the expression he would have had a receptively bigoted audience, even on our side of the Atlantic. And so I kind of like Howie's Longfellow theory and will spring it when we eat our Christmas turkey when I demand the pope's, or -- depending on who is present -- parson's nose, as these days parsons are Protestants.

I like the tail. It's fatty but there is also good chewy meat tucked up against the bone.

My research hints the phrase goes back to 1400 AD or so, as there is an old carving in a church that depicts a parson's face in the rump of a chicken (see bottom picture): https://www.cookipedia.co.uk/recipes_wiki/Parson's_nose