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Boiled Turkey with Oyster Sauce

A whole turkey is boiled with oysters, served with celery or oyster sauce and a slice of boiled salt pork or ham.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Turkey and pork work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 830 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Boiled Turkey with Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the turkey as you would for roasting and fill it with a dressing of oysters.

  2. Tie the legs and wings close to the body.

Boil

  1. Place the turkey breast down in a pot of boiling salted water.

  2. Skim the water often and boil for 2 hours, ensuring the skin does not break.

  3. Optionally, save the boiling liquid for soup by adding seasonings.

Serve

  1. Serve with celery or oyster sauce and a thin slice of boiled salt pork or ham on each plate.

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 + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together830 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Oyster + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,255 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Turkey + celerytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together431 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  5. Pork + celerytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,572 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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 the dish, cooked gently in simmering water to stay moist.
Oysters
Dressing ingredient that adds a briny, savoury flavour inside the bird.
Salt pork or ham
Adds salty, savoury flavour to the plate alongside the turkey.

The step that matters

Keep the water at a gentle boil and skim often. Vigorous boiling can split the skin and toughen the meat, while skimming removes foam that would cloud the cooking liquid and taint its flavour.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, oyster, pork):

  1. Sagefits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, oyster, pork. 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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