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Boiled Turkey with Celery

A boiled turkey stuffed with veal or sausage meat, flavored with celery, carrot, onion, and bouquet garni.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 with Celery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stuff the turkey with veal or sausage meat stuffing and truss it for boiling.

  2. Place the turkey in an oval braising pan and cover it with white stock.

  3. Add the carrot, onion, celery, and bouquet garni.

Boil and garnish

  1. Boil the turkey, then simmer gently for two hours.

  2. Prepare a garnish of celery while the turkey cooks.

Serve

  1. Once cooked, remove the string, dish up the turkey, and garnish with celery.

  2. Pour celery sauce over the turkey and serve.

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 body of the dish and carries the flavour of the stock and stuffing.
Veal or sausage meat stuffing
Adds richness and moisture to the turkey as it cooks inside the bird.
White stock
Gently cooks the turkey while supplying savory flavour to the meat and sauce.
Celery
Contributes a fresh, aromatic flavour to the cooking liquid and the garnish.

The step that matters

Simmer gently rather than boil. Once the turkey comes to a boil, it should be kept at a gentle simmer. A hard rolling boil toughens muscle proteins and can make the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, veal, carrot, clove, celery. 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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Sauce 4

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