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Boiled Turkey

A whole turkey boiled with oyster stuffing, served with oyster or celery sauce, optional salt pork or bacon, and optional flour coating.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fill the turkey with oyster stuffing and tie the legs and wings close to the body.

  2. Optionally, roll the turkey in a cloth dipped in flour before boiling.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the turkey breast down in salted boiling water.

  2. Skim the surface and boil for about 2 hours, ensuring the skin does not break.

  3. Boil a piece of salt pork.

  4. Serve with oyster or celery sauce.

  5. Serve a thin slice 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. Pork + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Oyster + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together360 recipes

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

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

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

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 by boiling so the meat stays moist.
Oyster stuffing
Fills the bird, adding flavour and moisture to the meat as it cooks.
Salt pork
Adds savoury, salty flavour when boiled and served as an optional accompaniment.

The step that matters

Keeping the skin intact while boiling. Skimming the surface and keeping the boil gentle protects the skin from splitting. Vigorous boiling can break the skin and let juices escape, leaving the meat drier and less tidy.

“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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