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Turkey Warmed Over

A dish of turkey or chicken pieces warmed with butter, gravy, milk, and flour, served with bread or biscuits soaked in hot salted water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Turkey Warmed Over

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turkey

  1. Warm pieces of turkey or chicken in a frying pan with butter.

  2. Place the warmed pieces on a warm platter and surround them with bread or biscuit slices dipped in hot salted water.

  3. Put the platter in a warm oven with the door open.

Make the sauce

  1. In the frying pan, melt butter and add milk and leftover gravy.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Add enough flour mixed with cold milk or water to achieve a creamy consistency.

  4. Season the sauce with salt and pepper.

  5. Add finely chopped dark meat to the sauce.

  6. Cook the sauce for a few moments.

  7. Pour the sauce over the biscuit and turkey.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the milk and gravy into a creamy sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour when warming the meat and starting the sauce.
Leftover gravy
Supplies savoury flavour and body to the sauce.
Milk
Forms the base of the sauce, giving it a smooth, creamy texture.
Bread or biscuits
Soaks up hot salted water to become soft and absorb the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the flour mixture to the boiling sauce. Flour must be mixed with cold liquid first so it disperses without lumps. Stirred into hot liquid it clumps, and the sauce needs to be cooked briefly so the starch thickens fully and loses its raw taste.

“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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