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Roast Turkey with Chestnut Stuffing and Sauce

A roasted turkey stuffed with a mixture of veal, salt pork, and chestnuts, served with a chestnut sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Turkey and pork work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 830 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Roast Turkey with Chestnut Stuffing and Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chestnuts

  1. Boil the chestnuts in water for a few minutes.

  2. Remove the chestnuts and rub off the thin, dark skin.

  3. Cover the chestnuts with boiling water and simmer for 1 hour.

  4. Mash the chestnuts finely.

Stuff and roast the turkey

  1. Clean the turkey and lard the breast.

  2. Mix the chopped veal, salt pork, half of the mashed chestnuts, pepper, salt, and stock or water.

  3. Stuff the turkey with the mixture.

  4. Truss the turkey.

  5. Roast the turkey.

Serve

  1. Serve with a sauce made from the remaining mashed chestnuts.

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. Turkey + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together830 recipes

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

  2. Turkey + chestnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together136 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Veal + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,930 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Chestnut + peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Chestnut + porktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together437 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Chestnuts
Their starch and mild sweetness give the stuffing body and a soft, mellow flavour.
Veal
Adds savoury meat richness and a tender texture to the stuffing.
Salt pork
Adds fat that keeps the stuffing moist and flavourful as it cooks.
Turkey
The main roasted meat, whose lardered breast stays moister during roasting.

The step that matters

Simmering the chestnuts after peeling. Simmering until fully tender lets the chestnut starch soften so it mashes smoothly. Undercooked chestnuts stay grainy and make the stuffing and sauce stiff and lumpy.

“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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