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To Boil a Turkey with Oyster Sauce

A boiled turkey stuffed with a forcemeat of bread, oysters, butter, cream, and eggs, served with oyster sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Boil a Turkey with Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the forcemeat

  1. Mix the grated bread, chopped oysters, nutmeg, pepper, salt, butter, cream, and eggs into a light forcemeat.

  2. Stuff the turkey's craw with the forcemeat.

  3. Form the remaining forcemeat into balls and boil the balls in water.

Cook the turkey

  1. Sew up the turkey without stuffing the body and dredge it with flour.

  2. Place the turkey in a kettle of cold water.

  3. Cover the kettle, bring the water to a boil, and skim the surface.

  4. Let the turkey boil very slowly for 1 hour.

  5. Remove the kettle from heat.

  6. Let the turkey sit in the hot water for 30 minutes to steam.

Serve

  1. Serve the turkey with oyster sauce poured over it and the balls arranged around it.

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

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

  2. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Eggs
Bind the forcemeat so it holds together when shaped and boiled.
Grated bread
Gives the forcemeat body and absorbs the butter and cream to keep it soft.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the forcemeat and keeps it moist as it cooks.
Cream
Adds moisture that keeps the light forcemeat tender.
Oysters
Contribute a briny, savoury flavour to the forcemeat and sauce.

The step that matters

Boil very slowly for 1 hour. A gentle simmer cooks the turkey and forcemeat evenly and keeps the meat tender. A hard, rolling boil toughens the proteins and can break apart the delicate forcemeat balls.

“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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