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Boiled or Steamed Turkey or Fowl

A whole turkey or fowl boiled or steamed with salt, pepper, lemon, and optional stuffing, served with sauce and rice or macaroni.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled or Steamed Turkey or Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the turkey or fowl and rub it well with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and lemon juice.

  2. Stuff with oyster or bread stuffing if desired, but it is better without stuffing.

  3. Truss the legs and wings close to the body and pin the fowl in a cloth to keep it white and preserve its shape.

Cook

  1. Put the fowl into boiling salted water.

  2. Cook for 20 minutes per pound, slowly until tender but not falling apart.

  3. For better flavor, consider steaming the turkey instead of boiling.

Serve

  1. Serve with oyster, celery, lemon, or caper sauce, garnished with boiled rice or macaroni.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Turkey + oystertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together473 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey or fowl
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and moist during slow cooking in liquid.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the rubbed-on seasoning.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and helps draw flavor into its surface before cooking.

The step that matters

Slow cooking in boiling salted water. Boiling too hard or too long makes the meat tough and cause it to fall apart. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer and timing by weight cooks the fowl evenly and keeps it tender but intact.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, pepper, oyster, rice):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Grapefits less well
  4. Plumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, pepper, oyster, rice. 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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