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Hooverized Christmas Dinners

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,418 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Hooverized Christmas Dinners

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare the turkey or goose by seasoning and roasting it until fully cooked.

  2. Make the oyster or sage dressing and stuff it into the bird before roasting.

  3. Prepare giblet gravy using the giblets from the turkey or goose.

  4. Boil and mash the potatoes until smooth.

  5. Serve cranberry sauce or jelly alongside the turkey.

  6. Boil and mash the turnips until smooth.

  7. Cook the squash until tender and season to taste.

  8. Wash and prepare the celery for serving.

  9. Bake the pumpkin pie according to your favorite recipe.

  10. Arrange fruit and nuts on a serving platter.

  11. Prepare war plum pudding according to your favorite recipe.

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. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,047 recipes

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

  3. Potato + turniptop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turkey + cranberrytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Cranberry + turniptop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, oyster, potato, cranberry, turnip, celery, pumpkin):

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Peasfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, oyster, potato, cranberry, turnip, celery, pumpkin. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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