Skip to main content
Main

Roast Turkey, Garnished with Sausages

Roast turkey garnished with cooked sausages, served with a gravy thickened with flour.

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

Roast Turkey, Garnished with Sausages

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stuff

  1. Wash the turkey carefully.

  2. Stuff the turkey as usual, adding a little cooked sausage to the dressing.

Roast

  1. Place the turkey in a roasting pan and pour 1 cup of boiling water over it.

  2. Roast the turkey for about 10 minutes per pound, slowly for the first hour.

  3. Baste frequently with the pan juices.

  4. Dredge the turkey with flour.

  5. Baste with butter at the end.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the turkey from the oven and arrange boiled sausages around it.

  2. Pour off the fat from the gravy.

  3. Thicken the gravy with browned flour.

  4. Season the gravy with salt and pepper.

  5. Boil the gravy once.

  6. Serve the gravy in a boat.

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 + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,636 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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 roast, with its meat cooking through during the long roasting time.
Cooked sausage
Adds savory flavor to the dressing and the sausages served alongside the turkey.
Flour
Dusted on the turkey to help it brown, and browned flour thickens the gravy.
Butter
Basting with butter adds fat that enriches flavor and promotes golden browning on the skin.

The step that matters

Roast slowly for the first hour. A large bird roasted hot on the outside can stay undercooked at the center. Gentle early heat lets the thick meat cook through evenly before the skin browns too far.

“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