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Roast Turkey with Sage Dressing

Roast turkey seasoned with salt and pepper, served with a sage bread dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Turkey with Sage Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dressing

  1. Dress the turkey and rub inside and out with salt and pepper.

  2. Prepare the dressing by softening the stale bread and corn bread crumbs with warm liquid from boiled giblets.

  3. Sprinkle the mixture with sage, black pepper, and salt, then add butter and mix well.

  4. Optionally, cut giblets into bits and add to the dressing.

Roast and finish

  1. Sew up the turkey opening and place it in a roasting pan.

  2. Add water to the pan and roast until tender, about 3 hours for a 10-pound turkey.

  3. When tender, remove the cover, baste with butter, and dredge with flour for a frothy appearance.

  4. Remove the turkey from the pan and make gravy by adding more water and thickening.

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 + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Turkey + sagetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together154 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Pepper + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Provides the main roasted meat that the dressing accompanies and the pan drippings flavor.
Stale bread
Soaks up warm liquid to form the soft, moist body of the dressing.
Corn bread crumbs
Add body and a tender, crumbly texture to the dressing.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the skin brown when basted.
Flour
Dredged over the turkey to help thicken the drippings and create a frothy surface.

The step that matters

Roasting until tender after covering. Covered roasting with added water traps steam and cooks the bird gently, but the cover must come off near the end so the skin can brown and the turkey must reach full doneness, since undercooked poultry is unsafe and overcooking dries the meat.

Swap the sage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, pepper, bread, corn, butter, flour):

  1. Sagethe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, pepper, bread, corn, 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.

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