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Boiled Turkey

A whole turkey boiled in salted water, served with a corn flour and parsley sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and parsley work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 943 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boiled Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the turkey

  1. Prepare the turkey for boiling as directed in the chapter on trussing.

  2. Place the turkey in a pot with enough tepid water to cover it and add a little coarse sea salt.

  3. Let it simmer for 1 hour until the water is reduced to the proper quantity for sauce.

Make the sauce

  1. Season and thicken the sauce with corn flour and chopped parsley.

  2. Pour the sauce over the 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. Corn + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together943 recipes

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

  2. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Turkey + parsleytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together532 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Turkey + corntop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey
Is the main protein, cooked gently in water so it stays moist and tender.
Corn flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells and sets in the hot, reduced liquid.
Chopped parsley
Adds fresh, green aroma and colour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer gently and reduce to the right amount. Simmer gently rather than at a hard boil, since vigorous bubbling toughens the meat and reduces the liquid too quickly. The water must reduce to the right amount, because the sauce's thickness depends on it.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, corn, flour):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, corn, flour. 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.

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