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To Roast a Turkey with Oysters

A roasted turkey stuffed with oysters and seasoned with spices, served with a sauce of ham essence and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Roast a Turkey with Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stuffing

  1. Cut the liver into pieces and place it in a stew-pan with the washed oysters and their strained liquor.

  2. Add pepper, salt, bay leaves, mace, and butter.

  3. Stew gently for 10 minutes, then remove from heat.

Roast the turkey

  1. Singe the turkey and stuff it with the oyster mixture.

  2. Cover with paper and roast at a distance from the fire.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Heat the essence of ham in another stew-pan.

  2. Boil the pint of oysters, remove the gills, and add them to the essence of ham with a little lemon juice.

  3. Boil briefly.

  4. Pour the sauce over the turkey before serving.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

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

  5. Oyster + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Turkey
Forms the main body of the dish, carrying the stuffing and sauce.
Oysters
Add a briny, savoury flavour to the stuffing and the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and with flour thickens the sauce.
Essence of ham
Provides a savoury meaty base for the sauce.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, oyster, pepper, butter, flour, ham, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, oyster, pepper, butter, flour, ham, lemon. 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.

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