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To Bone a Turkey or Fowl

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Bone a Turkey or Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the onions until slightly soft, then chop them.

  2. Cut through the skin and center of the back of the bird.

  3. Carefully raise the flesh on either side with a sharp knife until you reach the wing and thigh sockets.

  4. Detach the wings and thighs if needed, then remove the body from the flesh.

  5. Fill the legs and wings with forcemeat and the body with a mixture of livers, parboiled tongue, sausage meat, or bacon.

  6. Sew up and truss the bird as usual.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Onion + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Bread + sagetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,778 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

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

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

Swap the sage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, bread, butter):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, bread, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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