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Roast Turkey Au Cresson

Roast Turkey au Cresson is a whole turkey roasted with butter, salt, pepper, and served with watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and pepper work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 983 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Roast Turkey Au Cresson

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Clean the turkey and season it inside and out with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  3. Place the turkey in a roasting pan and rub the skin with butter.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast the turkey in the preheated oven until the internal temperature reaches 165°F (74°C), about 2 to 3 hours depending on size.

  2. Let the turkey rest for 20 minutes before carving.

  3. Serve with fresh watercress on the side.

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. Watercress + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Turkey + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,636 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Watercress + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Whole turkey
Provides the main lean protein, which firms and sets as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat that helps the skin brown and keeps the surface from drying.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and helps move salt into the flesh for flavour.

The step that matters

Let the turkey rest for 20 minutes before carving. Heat pushes juices toward the centre during roasting. Resting lets the muscle fibres relax so the juices redistribute, keeping the meat moister when carved.

“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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