You know, that fatty, bony bit of the roasted turkey that most people don’t use.
On a chicken, people call that bit “the pope’s nose.” My kids fight over it.
It’s the Pope’s nose on a turkey too–guess popes come in all sizes. 
Pope’s nose! Where’s the :smackhead: smiley?
Thank you both.
I have never heard of this. Have any other body parts of popes lent their names to objects?
“Pope’s nose” redirects here. It may also refer to the licence plate light on early Volkswagen Beetles.
I am told my grandfather preferred “the part of the chicken/turkey that went over the fence last.”
Turkey tail or turkey butt has an international exportation market in places such as Micronesia, Samoa, and Ghana. The turkey tail is commonly exported from America because it is considered unhealthy and cut off the normal turkey.[6] After World War II, cheap imported turkey tails became popular in Samoa. Because the cut has a very high fat content, it was banned from 2007 to 2013 to combat obesity, only allowed back when Samoa joined the World Trade Organization. The meat is otherwise used in pet food.[7]
Also, the parson’s nose. I have heard that Catholics call it the parson’s nose, and Protestants call it the Pope’s nose.
I’ve only heard Pope’s nose from Catholics, but it’s not a term that comes up often. I’m not even quite sure what kind of clergy a parson is.
In Yiddish it’s the “pupik”, though that sometimes refers to the gizzard.
Protestant, usually Anglican.
That’s what I originally thought (though I was quickly reminded of Pope’s nose – Hey, they both start with ‘p’), but when I looked it up before posting I saw that ‘pupik’ meant ‘belly button’.
It does. But in cooking it means the tail end or gizzard of a chicken, who have no belly buttons.
Yiddish was both my parents first language and that’s what they called the tail end of the chicken.
I recall Jean “Edith Bunker” Stapleton relating (with shame) an anecdote in which, as a child, she was tasked with picking up a chicken from the butcher store, and being instructed to tell the butcher to “cut off the Pope’s nose.”
ETA : And “Pope’s nose” would really be the only clergyman whose nose would make sense. Because Popes were supposed to be always old Italian men, and old Italian men have big noses.
Yeah, I guess historically in contrast to vicar, depending on who runs their particular church. But I associate parson with western films, and vicar with Anglican but not Episcopalian traditions. That’s probably wrong, but how I heard the terms the most.
Apparently turkey tails are contentious in some countries, blamed for involvement in an unhealthy diet.
A vicar is a parson (a paid member of the clergy) who is an employee rather than being directly entitled to the income of the of the church (a rector). So the distinction was only really important in the Anglican / European traditions where the church had property and was paid taxes.
That’s what we always called it. My brother and I always fought over it. One Thanksgiving a guest grabbed it, but it sat on her plate uneaten. From that day on, we called her “the pupik thief.”
It’s the first bit of the hot Costco rotisserie chicken that gets snitched, before I cut it up for dinner.
“The Pupik Thief” sounds like a Shalom Aleichem story.
Interesting - where I grew up (West Cumbria, England) we had what you might call Sectarianism Lite - aware of a separation but as kids it wasn’t a thing we worried too much about. I was notionally C of E and only ever knew the term Parson’s Nose, (so the opposite of what you had heard); and I would have thought, if it just went by religion, I would have at least heard of Pope’s Nose because of the sizeable local catholic population.
Fiddling around on google I wonder if it’s regional, and Pope’s Nose is more of an American thing?
j
I never heard Pope’s nose in New York; my family was Catholic. I don’t recall we used parson’s nose either. I first heard Pope’s nose from a Protestant roommate.
Grew up in Ohio where huge chicken and turkey farms are quite common and I’ve never heard it called that as well. My parents cut away the entire back where the tail piece was and sometimes fried it up or just threw it away. Same with the neck, heart, liver and gizzard. Sometimes used and sometimes not.