She left it out all night without refrigeration? It’s a wonder you never got food poisoning. Or did you?
We don’t brine and we stuff. The stuffing must be very moist. Pre-wipe down the bird with melted butter.
Here’s the secret: Cook at low temp: breast-side down. Then for the last half hour crank the over temp higher and put the breast back up to brown. Baste.
Take it out as soon as the juices in the thigh joint are still just a little pink.
Thankfully I have never experienced this personally, just heard the stories. My girlfriend clearly has a very strong constitution.
My wife requires that turkey be dry; that the whole point is to let the gravy (which she specifically does not de-fat…she thinks her gravy is The Best Gravy Ever) do the moisturizing.
Between that and Stove-Top stuffing, it’s pretty much ruined Thanksgiving for me.
I have visions of you sneaking out into the garage to snack on one of the moist rotisery chickens from Walmart you’ve hidden out there to get your moist bird fix on Turkey day 
As the years went by, turkey cooking procedures did improve. The Butterball tech – pre-injecting birds with oil/brine/butter-flavored-whatever did improve moistness.
Basting was something that we began to hear about more and more. Consider this: you have x amount of time to cook, and you’re opening the door to smear on some butter-broth mixture with a celery leaf brush, and you end up losing heat. That alone causes you to cook your bird less, so adds moistness by not overcooking. And we eventually heard of the tricks like laying the bird on its sides for part of the cooking.
I remember following the instructions to rotate the bird, from breast side down, to its sides, then finally right side up. That is not as easy as it sounds – the bird is hot, you’re in front of a hot open oven, stuffing is escaping, the bird is heavy, and slippery, and you don’t really have something to insulate your hands (silicone oven mitts weren’t easy to find back then.) And the breast meat ended up split.
See, mom insisted on skinning the bird. She’s repulsed by the thought of consuming even the tiniest root of the smallest pin feather. So that’s another avenue of lost juiciness. I leave the skin on, she can pick it off her plate.
'Course, now I brine just about any poultry. Even if I greatly overcook, for example, when I barbeque an entire bird and misjudge the heat of the charcoal, the meat is still juicy.
Remember this is a house in Britain on the night of 24 December - temperature in the dining room could easily be down at 6/7 degrees C. Not ideal but probably not a problem - especially if the bird’s been cooked to death!
To be fair, my parents have often kept the leftover bird in the garage as the fridge wasn’t big enough. The garage was always fridge cold at Christmas time.
I’m happy to report the two turkeys I sampled yesterday were both quite flavorful and moist.
Yahhh culinary progress!
Mine came out fine as usual; no brining, no turning, no bags or other oddities. It was a free-range bird, so it was a bit tougher than the ones produced by giant conglomerates, but not an issue. The gravy was, of course, nectar of the gods.
Kosher, organic, free-range. It was fantastic, and using the housemade organic stock to baste the turkey made or delectable drippings.
I wouldn’t eat it off a dashboard, either, but the point of a good medium-rare steak is to heat the interior to a final temp of about 130 (I pull my medium rare roasts and steaks at around 120-125, as mentioned above), but use very high heat to get the crust nicely browned. (Something that wouldn’t happen on the dashboard. Yes, I know you’re being facetious.)
I think, for the most part, the dry birds of yesteryear are gone because most turkeys come pre-injected with a brine-type solution. Brining really isn’t necessary for any of those types of commercial birds. While turkey may be done at about 165, I’m with those that say the thigh and leg taste better cooked up a bit higher. We had our thigh at 165 yesterday, and there was plenty of pink juice running and the texture of the thigh at that temperature was not exactly pleasant to me. (As opposed to beef and pork, which I like at lower levels of doneness.) Breast meat, though, is great right at that temp, where it’s white all the way through, but it still has a very juicy and slightly loose consistency to it, much like a medium rare steak.
I don’t necessarily agree with this. When I make turkey myself (which I haven’t for the past four years, as Thanksgiving has been at the in-laws and you just don’t mess around in your mother-in-law’s kitchen and tell her what to do), it’s high-heat turkey all the way, just like I make my chicken.
It makes for the juiciest bird and crispiest skin. Since discovering high-heat methods of cooking poultry, I have not gone back to slow roasting methods which produce, perhaps counterintuitively, birds that are (or at least seem) drier, and lackluster skin (which, for me, is at least half the joy of poultry.)
I went with the Alton Brown method with a few modifications: brined the bird, leaving out some of AB’s odder additions, put some citrus in the cavity, 500 degrees for 30 minutes and then 350 for the remainder. Sliced up beautifully, and even the leftovers were moist and delicious.