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Boiled Turkey with Oyster Sauce

A boiled turkey stuffed with stale bread and oysters, seasoned with salt and pepper, served with oyster liquor.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Turkey and bread work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 822 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Boiled Turkey with Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turkey

  1. Pluck, singe, and wipe the turkey with a wet towel.

  2. Cut off the head and feet, then draw it without breaking the intestines.

  3. Stuff the turkey with equal quantities of stale bread and oysters, seasoned with salt and pepper, or truss it unstuffed.

Boil the turkey

  1. Place the turkey in a pot of boiling water, ensuring it is fully covered, and remove any scum that rises.

  2. Boil the turkey gently for about 2 hours, or until tender.

  3. While the turkey is boiling, remove all bits of shell from the oysters and strain their liquor.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Bread + oystertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,545 recipes

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

  3. Turkey + oystertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together473 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey
Provides the main body of meat, which becomes tender as it cooks slowly in liquid.
Oysters
Add a briny, savoury flavour to the stuffing and the strained liquor.
Stale bread
Absorbs the juices and flavours of the oysters without turning mushy, so the stuffing holds its shape.

The step that matters

Keep the turkey fully covered and boil it gently. Water must cover the bird so it cooks evenly. A hard, rolling boil toughens muscle fibres and can break the skin and tear the meat, so a gentle simmer gives a more tender result.

“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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