IStock Photo 10991234 © Bob Ingelhart

Norman Rockwell immortalized the roast turkey on a 1943 cover of The Saturday Evening Post. Benjamin Franklin suggested the live model replace the eagle in the Great Seal of America. It’s the centerpiece of countless parades, foot races, bowling competitions, presidential pardons, and, of course, dinners: every year, millions of American families cook one for the fourth Thursday in November. The Thanksgiving turkey is a symbol of plenty, and there are plenty of ways to cook it.

There are also plenty of ways to ruin one. Just ask the folks at the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line®.

Begun in 1981, Butterball’s turkey hotline answered 11,000 turkey-related calls in its first year alone. Today, it has fielded well over a million calls, and receives more than 100,000 calls concerning turkey preparation each November and December. Each year, 1 in 1,299 households makes a call to the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line®. On the day before Thanksgiving alone, 1 in 12,990 households will call the hotline with a turkey-related query.

Need to know what temperature to cook a turkey at? How long to keep it in the oven? How to grill it, roast it, marinate it, or deep fry it? They’ll take you through it all, step by step.

And that’s not even remotely all. Butterball’s turkey experts will take a crack at any turkey-related query, no matter how off-the-wall. Butterball media director Bridget O’Malley writes that her Turkey Talk-Line® experts “get calls from Alaska to Florida about every conceivable turkey and meal preparation topic. We love to hear from all ages and types of people—that’s part of the fun.”
In an email interview, turkey expert Sue Smith recalls the woman who stored her turkey overnight in a snowdrift: “A lady from Colorado called about ‘how to thaw’ her frozen Butterball. She proudly shared the fact that her turkey was stored in a snow bank outside! It had snowed the night before and it then dawned on her that she didn’t have a clue which snow bank her turkey was in. At that point, the conversation was really over because she was now on a mission to go find her turkey.”

“A first-time Thanksgiving chef called Marge Klindera, a 20+ year Talk-Line veteran, in tears Thanksgiving morning last year,” recalls Ms. O’Malley. “She was so proud to have thawed the turkey successfully and continued to rinse the turkey—with dish soap! The tears started flowing when the turkey wouldn’t stop sudsing. If only she called before she would have found out you don’t have to rinse the turkey—just pat it dry with paper towels.”

Other calls have come from people wondering if they can cook a turkey in the back of their cars, using the sun’s rays; asking how to defrost a turkey on their cars’ radiators; and a Kentucky woman who called in 1993 to find out how to extricate her Chihuahua from a turkey. After several unsuccessful solutions, Butterball’s expert finally had the woman carefully widen the turkey’s opening with a knife, freeing the puppy. The experts at the Turkey Talk-Line® appear to be unstumpable.

By far the most common question they receive is how to thaw a turkey: they recommend thawing it slowly in the refrigerator, one day per four pounds of turkey (If time isn’t on your side, you can submerge it in cold sink-water, at a half-hour per pound).

The calls to 1-800-BUTTERBALL start the first week of November. But talking turkey isn’t the only option: Butterball’s website hosts turkey bloggers and a weekly turkey podcast and virtual chatrooms. The turkey expert webpage (click “tips and how-tos”) contains conversion charts, cooking safety guides, time- and cost-budgeting suggestions, how to choose a turkey, how to thaw a frozen bird, how to know when it’s done, and suggestions for leftovers. The prepackaged information may not be able to help you with a misplaced Chihuahua or give the call-in experts a good story to tell, but you can probably learn how to cook a turkey.