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Turkey Boiled

A whole turkey is stuffed, wrapped, and boiled in salted water, served with white sauce or parsley and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Turkey and truffle work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 167 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Turkey Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stuff the turkey with truffles or sausage meat.

  2. Wrap the turkey in a clean floured cloth.

  3. Add coarse sea salt to a pot of water and bring to a boil.

Boil and serve

  1. Submerge the wrapped turkey in the boiling water.

  2. Cover the pot and simmer for 2 hours, removing any scum that forms.

  3. Serve with white sauce or parsley and butter.

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. Turkey + truffletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together167 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Turkey + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together531 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Truffle + saucetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,490 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hen turkey
Provides the main body of meat that cooks through during the long simmer.
Truffles or sausage meat
Adds savoury flavour and moisture to the bird from the inside as it cooks.

The step that matters

Simmering with the lid on. A gentle simmer cooks the turkey evenly, while a hard rolling boil can toughen the meat and break up the cloth. Skimming scum keeps the cooking liquid clean.

“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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