Skip to main content
Main

To Bone and Cook a Boned Turkey

A boned turkey stuffed, simmered, and served with a gravy jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,609 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Bone and Cook a Boned Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the turkey

  1. Clean the turkey well and lay it on the table.

  2. Use a small, sharp knife to cut the flesh from the bones, keeping the skin intact.

  3. Cut around the wings, breast, and legs, then split the back halfway and remove the bones.

  4. Mix the chicken meat, bread crumbs, pepper, salt, mace, sweet marjoram, butter, and eggs to make stuffing.

  5. Fill the turkey with the stuffing and sew it up to maintain its shape.

Make the stock and brown

  1. In a deep saucepan, place the cracked calf's feet, removed turkey bones, onion, carrot, mace, pepper, salt, and cloves.

  2. Lay the turkey on top and add 2 quarts of water; cover tightly and simmer for 3 hours.

  3. Remove the turkey, flour it, baste with butter, and brown it in the oven at 400°F (200°C).

Clarify the gravy and set the jelly

  1. If there is less than 1 quart of gravy, add more water and boil for 30 minutes.

  2. Beat the whites and shells of 2 eggs and stir into the gravy; boil for 15 minutes.

  3. Strain the gravy through a cloth into a jelly mold.

  4. Once the turkey is cold and the jelly is hard, serve the turkey with jelly on the breast or cut it small and serve around the turkey.

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Turkey + chickentop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together688 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-decenal (green, must).

  4. Mace + marjoramtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together767 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked whole so the skin browns and the meat stays moist.
Chicken
Its finely chopped meat forms a binding stuffing that holds the boned turkey's shape.
Eggs
Bind the stuffing together, and their whites clarify the gravy as they set.
Calf's feet
Their collagen releases gelatin into the stock, helping the gravy set into a firm jelly.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and add body to the stuffing so it stays tender rather than dense.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the turkey brown when basted in the oven.

The step that matters

Clarifying the gravy with egg whites and shells. Simmering beaten whites with shells makes proteins coagulate and trap cloudy particles, so straining through cloth yields a clear jelly. Boiling too vigorously would break up the raft and leave the gravy murky.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, chicken, meat, bread, pepper, marjoram, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, chicken, meat, bread, pepper, marjoram, butter. 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.

You might also like

Turkey StuffingTurkey Stuffing6 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipes