Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Turkey

A whole turkey stuffed with a mixture of veal, ham, nutmeg, mace, and salt, boiled and garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,062 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Boiled Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turkey

  1. Draw and wash the turkey thoroughly.

  2. Season the turkey with coarse sea salt, but do not add pepper.

  3. Make a force-meat by mixing the minced veal, grated ham, nutmeg, mace, and salt to taste.

  4. Fill the crop of the turkey with the force-meat and tie or skewer it securely.

  5. Dredge the turkey with flour and wrap it in a napkin.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the wrapped turkey in a large pot filled with salted water.

  2. Boil the turkey for about two hours, adjusting time for larger birds.

  3. Remove the turkey from the napkin and place it on a large dish.

  4. Garnish the edges of the dish with double parsley and serve with rich oyster sauce in a tureen.

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. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Ham + oystertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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, cooking into tender meat during the long boil.
Cold veal
Adds a finely minced meat filling that gives the force-meat body and texture.
Grated ham
Contributes salty, savoury flavour to the force-meat filling.
Flour
Dredging coat that helps form a protective layer around the turkey during boiling.

The step that matters

Securing the force-meat in the crop. If the crop is not tied or skewed securely, the filling can escape into the boiling water and the bird may lose its shape. A firm closure keeps the stuffing contained while the turkey cooks.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, veal, ham, nutmeg, flour, parsley, oyster):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, veal, ham, nutmeg, flour, parsley, oyster. 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.

More boiled turkey recipes

with Oyster Sauce 11Eggs 4with Celery Sauce 4with Oyster Stuffing 4Celery Sauce for 3 See all 186 →

You might also like

Turkey SoupTurkey Soup71 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesTurkey StuffingTurkey Stuffing26 recipesTurkey DressingTurkey Dressing24 recipes