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To Roast a Turkey

A roasted turkey prepared with a bread, butter, and pepper filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Roast a Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the turkey thoroughly and rub it with salt and pepper.

  2. Prepare a filling by moistening the toasted bread with water and seasoning it with pepper, butter, and a little salt.

Roast

  1. Place the turkey in a pan with 1 quart of water and add the gizzard and giblets.

  2. Dredge the turkey well with flour and baste it frequently.

  3. Roast a large turkey for 3 hours or a small one for 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Cut up the giblets and serve them in the gravy, which will thicken from the flour.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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 dish; its meat cooks through during roasting.
Flour
Coats the turkey and thickens the pan juices into gravy.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the bread filling.
Toasted bread
Forms the body of the stuffing once moistened and seasoned.

The step that matters

Dredge the turkey well with flour and baste it frequently. Flour coating and repeated basting keep the surface moist and help it brown evenly, while the flour gives the pan juices body for gravy.

“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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