Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Turkey

A whole turkey is boiled with oyster stuffing and salted water, served with oyster or celery sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turkey and oyster work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 473 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Boiled Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the turkey as you would for baking or roasting.

  2. Fill the turkey with oyster stuffing.

  3. Tie the legs and wings close to the body.

Boil

  1. Place the turkey breast down in salted boiling water and skim the water often.

  2. Boil for about 2 hours, but do not let the skin break.

Serve

  1. Serve with oyster or celery sauce.

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

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

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 its meat firms and turns opaque as it cooks.
Oyster stuffing
Fills the cavity and adds savory flavor and moisture to the inside of the bird.

The step that matters

Boil for about 2 hours without letting the skin break. The skin holds in juices and protects the meat. A vigorous boil can split it, letting moisture escape and the meat dry out and lose flavor.

“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.

More boiled turkey recipes

You might also like