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Boiled Turkey

A whole turkey boiled with salt, vegetables, herbs, and spices, served with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Boiled Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the turkey by trussing it: push the legs up, cut a slit in each side, and draw the legs into the body.

  2. Bind the turkey into shape with tape and dust it with flour.

  3. Place the turkey in an oval pot and cover it with warm water.

  4. Add salt, carrot, onion, cloves, peppercorns, celery, and herbs to the pot.

Boil and simmer

  1. Bring the water to a boil.

  2. Simmer gently for 2 hours.

  3. Skim off any scum that rises.

  4. Once cooked, drain the turkey briefly.

Sauce and serve

  1. Make a thick white sauce or béchamel using some of the boiling water.

  2. Pour the sauce over the turkey.

  3. Serve with oyster sauce, celery sauce, Hollandaise, or parsley sauce.

  4. Garnish with forcemeat balls, crisp bacon rolls, or lemon and parsley.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Clove + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey
Forms the main dish; gentle simmering cooks the meat until tender and moist.
Flour
Dusted on the trussed bird to help hold its shape and surface during cooking.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the cooking water so the turkey is flavoured as it poaches.

The step that matters

Simmer gently. A gentle simmer cooks the turkey evenly and keeps the meat tender; a hard rolling boil toughens muscle fibres and can break the bird apart.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, carrot, clove, celery, 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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