Business: Churkey Day?

Mini-gobblers from Britain

As trumpeters wearing the ceremonial uniform of the Household Cavalry sounded a fanfare, waiters bearing silver platters of food strode into the opulent Lancaster Room of London's regal Savoy Hotel, long a favorite dining place of princes and Prime Ministers. What the 250 guests had gathered for, however, was not an affair of state but of the palate: a British firm was introducing the Churkey, a brand of bird that combines the delicate flavor of a chicken and the meatiness of a turkey.

Churkey is the creation of Buxted Poultry, Britain's largest marketer of table fowl. The company decided that British consumers needed a new variety of bird that would be large enough to feed a family at Sunday dinner but not nearly so tough as a typical 5-lb. roaster. Buxted's researchers found a way to produce such a bigger, better bird: take a young, small turkey and make it taste like a chicken.

Buxted's Churkey is a gobbler killed just 52 days after hatching, when it reaches a weight of about 5 lbs. Then it is injected with and marinated in a special secret broth distilled from the flesh of older chickens of egg-laying age, and quick-frozen for shipment to stores. The result is a bird that has the size and flavor of a mature chicken but the tenderness of a much younger one. An added bonus: like all turkeys, Churkey has a higher meat-to-bone ratio than chickens.

Buxted has no expectation that Churkeys will ever replace a large percentage of the 380 million chickens that the British now consume annually. At $2 per lb., Churkey costs almost twice as much as chicken. But company executives insist that their product represents "a serious effort by serious people to produce a new bird for which there is a genuine need." Americans, who put away 4 billion chickens a year, may be able to test that claim soon: Buxted has applied for a U.S. Churkey patent.