Skip to main content
Main

Turkey and Ham

A roasted turkey covered with ham slices, baked and basted until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Turkey and Ham

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Cover the uncarved side of the steamed turkey with thick slices of cooked ham.

  2. Bind the ham to the turkey with greased packthread.

Bake

  1. Place the turkey, cut side down, in a dripping pan with a little boiling water.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 45 minutes, basting the ham with its own grease when it begins to drip.

  3. Ten minutes before removing from the oven, clip the strings and transfer the ham to a hot dish.

  4. Dredge the upper side of the turkey with flour and baste with butter to create a brown froth.

Serve

  1. Serve the turkey with the ham arranged around it.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Turkey + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Turkey + hamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Ham + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Turkey + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together963 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 the meat that gets cooked through and browned.
Ham
Adds savory flavor and moisture, and its own grease bastes it as it cooks.
Butter
Basting fat that helps the surface brown and form a golden froth.
Flour
Dusted on the surface, it helps the butter brown the turkey and form a crisp coating.

The step that matters

Dredging the turkey with flour and basting with butter. Flour and butter together promote browning through the Maillard reaction and help build a crisp, golden surface. Adding them too early or without enough fat can leave the surface pale or scorched.

“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.

You might also like

Turkey SoupTurkey Soup71 recipesTurkey StuffingTurkey Stuffing26 recipesTurkey DressingTurkey Dressing24 recipesTurkey PattiesTurkey Patties12 recipes