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Bread Dressing for Turkey

A bread crumb dressing for turkey, made with butter, pepper, optional parsley, onion juice, cream or milk, and optional marjoram or thyme.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,979 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Bread Dressing for Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine the bread crumbs and butter.

  2. Season with pepper and add minced parsley if desired.

  3. Add a little onion juice for extra flavor.

  4. Moisten the mixture very slightly with cream or milk.

  5. If preferred, incorporate sweet marjoram or thyme.

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. Parsley + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,979 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + marjoramtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Form the bulk of the dressing and absorb moisture and butter.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the crumbs taste savory and feel tender.
Cream or milk
Moistens the crumbs slightly so the dressing holds together without becoming soggy.

The step that matters

Moisten the mixture very slightly with cream or milk. Bread crumbs absorb liquid quickly. Adding too much cream or milk makes the dressing soggy and dense, so add it gradually and stop once the crumbs just hold together.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, pepper, onion, cream, marjoram):

  1. Thymefits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Sagefits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, pepper, onion, cream, marjoram. 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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