Behold the Cthurkey! An abomination of turkey, crab and octopus (Picture: Twitter/damana)

With its tentacles and crustaceous claws, this horrifying holiday meal might be better suited to Halloween instead of Christmas.

Behold, the Cthurkey! A monstrous hybrid of crab, turkey and octopus – deliberately styled to look like a mythical beast from a horror novel.

The dish is the culinary concoction of Rusty Eulberg, who wanted to ‘do something unique’ for Christmas dinner.

Rusty named the abomination Cthurkey, because his wife is a big fan of Cthulhu – a mythical monster created by horror writer HP Lovecraft. The beast has an octopus-like head with a face of feelers, a scaly body and long, narrow wings.




His method involves roasting a turkey topped with bacon, while cooking the crab and the octopus separately. He then joins the three together to make a feast fit for Frankenstein’s table.

In an additional touch of menace, he serves the dish on an old Nazi platter featuring a Swastika on the bottom – a relic bought by a friend in an old abandoned Lutwaffe base in Germany.

Rusty told Gothamist: ‘The universal reaction was, “Oh my God, I couldn’t eat that”. But each individual piece was cooked separately. All I did was set them together on the plate. It was delicious.’

He has diversified the dish to create the Cthicken – squid, crab and chicken – and is also considering other methods of cooking, such as deep-fried Cthurkey.