The Turduken is obsolete. Behold the Cthuken. pic.twitter.com/M5JZ9s5zig
— Mana (@damana) December 16, 2013
With octopus legs protruding from a bird's body and gangly crab legs sticking out the sides, the Ctucken looks more like something out of a horror movie or maybe Japanese tentacle porn than something that appears on your holiday table.
So what exactly is it?
For answers, we turn to The Gothamist, which found out the tentacled delicacy comes from the mind of Rusty Eulberg, a database administrator from Lubbock, Texas. Eulberg told The Gothamist that the dish gets its name from horror writer H. P. Lovecraft -- specifically, Lovecraft's octopus-head creature the "Cthulhu." For those not familiar with the beast, it's "a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind." In other words, terrifying.
Eulberg says he calls the creation a "Cthurkey" not a "Ctucken" (since it doesn't involve a duck) and that he got the idea because he and wife "wanted to do something unique for Christmas dinner with friends of ours. Jenny is a big fan of Cthulhu so we went and bought some crab legs and some octopus and bacon and cooked them all separate and slapped them together on a plate, and that was it."
Eulberg says the next year he made a "Cthicken," which is pretty much the same thing except with squid (instead of octopus) and a chicken. He also serves his horrific surf-and-turf eats on an old Nazi plate with a swastika on the bottom.
And you thought your family had a dysfunctional Christmas.