Skip to main content
Main

Koiled Turkey

A turkey boiled with a bread crumb dressing and optional oysters, served with a butter‑egg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Koiled Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bird

  1. Prepare the turkey as you would for baking.

  2. Make a dressing by mixing bread crumbs, pepper, salt, hot water, and milk until soft.

  3. Chop parsley.

  4. Add the chopped parsley to the dressing, or fill the turkey with oysters.

  5. Fill the crop of the turkey with the dressing.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the turkey in a pot of warm salted water and boil until cooked but not falling apart.

  2. Wrap the boiled turkey with strings for easy handling.

  3. Take some of the boiling water.

  4. Add butter to the water.

  5. Mix in the yolks of the hard boiled eggs and flour.

  6. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  7. Pour the mixture over the turkey.

  8. Garnish with chopped eggs.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Turkey + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together822 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 is cooked whole by gentle boiling.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the hot water and milk to form a soft dressing that fills the bird.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the boiling liquid, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded flavour.
Hard boiled eggs
Yolks thicken the sauce and add richness; chopped eggs make a garnish.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water mixture into a sauce as it comes to a boil.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil. Flour needs to be heated fully to thicken a liquid. Stop short and the sauce stays thin and tastes floury; keep stirring so it does not scorch or lump.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, bread, pepper, milk, oyster, butter, egg):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Sagefits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, bread, pepper, milk, oyster, butter, egg. 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.

More boiled turkey recipes

with Oyster Sauce 11Eggs 4with Celery Sauce 4with Oyster Stuffing 4Celery Sauce for 3 See all 186 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesTurkey SoupTurkey Soup71 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes