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Roast Turkey or Chicken

A roasted fowl stuffed with bread and cracker crumbs, served with a giblet gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Turkey and bread work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 822 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Roast Turkey or Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Wash the fowl well in two or three waters and wipe dry.

  2. Dredge the inside and outside with flour, pepper, and salt.

  3. Prepare a dressing of bread and cracker crumbs and fill the body and crop of the fowl.

Roast and make gravy

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 2 to 3 hours, basting frequently.

  2. Stew the giblets in a saucepan.

  3. Chop the giblets finely just before serving.

  4. After removing the fowl, add the chopped giblets to the gravy.

  5. Thicken the gravy with a little flour mixed with the giblet water, boil, and serve in a gravy dish.

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 + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together822 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Turkey + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,636 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Turkey + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together963 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Turkey or chicken
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked whole by roasting.
Flour
Coats the bird and thickens the gravy so it becomes smooth and body-rich.
Bread crumbs
Form the dressing that absorbs juices and adds soft, savoury texture inside the bird.
Cracker crumbs
Add body to the dressing and help it hold together when stuffed.
Giblets
Simmered to make flavourful stock and chopped into the gravy for savoury depth.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy with a little flour mixed with the giblet water. Flour must be mixed smoothly into cold or cooled liquid before heating, because dry flour added directly to hot liquid clumps. Boiling then gelatinises the starch so the gravy thickens evenly.

“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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