Skip to main content
Main

Braised Roast Turkey, Capon, or Fowl

A braised roast turkey, capon, or fowl cooked with onions, carrots, turnip, celery, parsley, bay leaves, bacon, lemon, and fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Braised Roast Turkey, Capon, or Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Peel and wash the onions, carrot, turnip, and slice them thinly.

  2. Add the celery, parsley, and bay leaves to the vegetables.

  3. Spread the vegetables on three sheets of paper and pour oil over them.

Prepare the bird

  1. Cover the turkey or capon breast with bacon slices and place the bird on the vegetables.

  2. Lay lemon slices on the breast to keep it white and tie the paper around with string.

  3. Pass the spit through the bird and set it before the fire.

Roast

  1. Pour plenty of fat over the bird to moisten the paper and prevent burning.

  2. Roast for 3 hours at a distance from the fire; capons take 2 hours, poulardes 1.5 hours, fowls 1 hour, and chickens 30 minutes.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey or capon
Provides the main meat, which cooks through slowly at a distance from the fire.
Onions
Form a bed of aromatic vegetables that flavour the bird and its juices as it roasts.
Bacon
Covers the breast, basting it with melting fat so it stays moist and does not dry out.
Fat
Moistens the wrapping paper and helps prevent the bird from burning while it roasts.

The step that matters

Roast at a distance from the fire. Slow, indirect heat lets the thick breast and legs cook through without the outside scorching. Keeping the paper wet with fat protects the skin and keeps the meat moist.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, turkey, lemon):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, turkey, lemon. 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 roast turkey recipes

or Chicken 17with Oyster Dressing 8with Chestnuts 4with Giblet Sauce 3with Gravy 3with Oysters 3 See all 259 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesTurkey SoupTurkey Soup71 recipes