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Boiled Turkey

A boiled turkey stuffed with bread, salt, pepper, nutmeg, lemon peel, oysters, butter, suet, and egg, served with oyster sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Make a stuffing by mixing bread, salt, pepper, nutmeg, lemon peel, oysters, butter, suet, and egg.

  2. Stuff the turkey with the mixture and fasten the skin.

Cook and serve

  1. Wrap the turkey in a floured cloth and boil until cooked through.

  2. Prepare oyster sauce by combining butter, cream, and soy sauce.

  3. Serve the turkey with the oyster sauce poured over it.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Turkey + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together822 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Turkey
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked through by boiling in the cloth.
Bread
Soaks up fat and moisture in the stuffing, giving it a soft, bound texture.
Egg
Binds the stuffing ingredients together so they hold their shape while cooking.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour in both the stuffing and the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth body to the oyster sauce.

The step that matters

Wrap the turkey in a floured cloth and boil until cooked through. The flour coating and cloth shield the skin while it boils, and the bird must reach a safe internal temperature throughout, which a whole stuffed turkey takes a long time to do. Check the thickest parts, especially around the stuffing, rather than relying on time alone.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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