Skip to main content
Main

The Turkey

A roasted turkey served with various sauces and accompanied by boiled ham, bacon, tongue, or pickled pork.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

The Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the turkey by removing the gills from the oysters if using oyster forcemeat for stuffing.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook a small turkey for 1 hour or a large turkey for 1.5 hours.

  2. Serve the turkey with your choice of white, celery, oyster, or mushroom sauce, or parsley and butter poured over it.

  3. Accompany the dish with boiled ham, bacon, tongue, or pickled pork.

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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  3. Turkey + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together205 recipes

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

  4. Celery + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,006 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Mushroom + parsleytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,132 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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, providing the bulk of the meat to be roasted.
Oysters
Give the forcemeat stuffing a savoury, briny flavour.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, oyster, sauce, celery, mushroom, butter, ham):

  1. Thymefits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, oyster, sauce, celery, mushroom, butter, ham. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More roasted turkey recipes

with Stuffing 7Poult 5with Chestnuts 4with Oysters 3 See all 122 →

You might also like

Cream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesTurkey SoupTurkey Soup71 recipes