Skip to main content
Main

Wild Turkey

A wild turkey stuffed with breadcrumbs, pork fat, and spices, roasted and basted with butter, served with gravy, currant jelly, and cranberry sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Wild Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Draw and wash the turkey inside carefully.

  2. Wipe the cavity with a dry, soft cloth.

  3. Prepare a stuffing with breadcrumbs, chopped fat pork, pepper, and salt. Moisten the stuffing with milk, then beat in the egg and melted butter.

  4. Stuff the turkey with the mixture.

Roast and baste

  1. Baste with butter and water for the first hour.

  2. Baste three to four times with gravy, then five to six times with melted butter.

  3. Dredge the turkey with flour before finishing.

  4. Froth with butter and roast until golden brown.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Skim the gravy, add hot water, pepper, and thicken with chopped giblets and browned flour.

  2. Serve the gravy in a tureen.

  3. Garnish the turkey with small fried sausages and crisped parsley.

  4. Serve with currant jelly and cranberry 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Turkey + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together830 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pork + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Turkey + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together281 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

Butter and flour 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

Wild turkey
Forms the main body of the dish, carrying the stuffing and gravy.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb the milk and butter to make a moist, bound stuffing.
Fat pork
Adds fat and richness that keeps the stuffing moist during roasting.
Egg
Binds the stuffing so it holds together when cooked.
Butter
Adds fat that promotes browning and a golden crust on the turkey.
Flour
Browned and stirred into the gravy to thicken it.

The step that matters

Frothing with butter and roasting until golden brown. Butter browns through the milk solids and sugars at high heat, so the bird colours evenly. Too little heat or too little fat leaves the skin pale and dry.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, pork, pepper, milk, egg, butter, flour):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, pork, pepper, milk, egg, butter, flour. 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 roasted turkey recipes

with Stuffing 7Poult 5with Chestnuts 4with Oysters 3 See all 122 →

You might also like

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesTurkey SoupTurkey Soup71 recipesTurkey StuffingTurkey Stuffing26 recipes