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Roast Turkey, Giblet Sauce

Roast turkey served with a sauce made from boiled giblets and seasoned broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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, Giblet Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare and roast

  1. Singe, draw, and truss the turkey nicely.

  2. Cover the breast with the slice of fat salt pork.

  3. Roast the turkey at 400°F (200°C) for about 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  4. Untie the turkey, dish it up, and pour the drippings over it.

Make the giblet sauce

  1. In a pot, boil the heart and gizzard in the broth until done.

  2. Boil the liver in fat for 5 minutes, then drain and slice it.

  3. Thicken the broth slightly with flour and butter, then boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Skim the broth, add the sliced giblets, and season to taste.

  5. Add 1-2 teaspoons of Tournade's Kitchen Bouquet and serve in a sauce bowl with the roast 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. Turkey + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together830 recipes

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

  2. Pork + livertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Turkey + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

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

Flour and butter 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

Turkey
Provides the main roast meat and the drippings that season the dish.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth, slightly thickened sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and adds a rich, rounded flavor.
Broth
Forms the liquid base of the giblet sauce.
Turkey liver
Adds a rich, savory depth to the sauce when sliced into it.

“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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