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Boiled Turkey

A whole turkey stuffed with a mixture of veal, ham, nutmeg, and mace, boiled and 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: 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

  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, or longer if it is very large.

  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, cooked gently by boiling to become tender.
Cold veal
Adds richness and moisture to the force-meat stuffing that fills the crop.
Grated ham
Adds savoury, salty depth to the force-meat stuffing.
Flour
Dredging coats the wrapped turkey, helping the outer surface hold together during boiling.

The step that matters

Securing the stuffed crop. If the crop is not tied or skewed tightly, the force-meat can leak out or shift during the long boil, leaving the stuffing unevenly cooked and the bird poorly shaped.

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.

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