Name: Stuffed Turkey with Chestnuts
Ingredients: 1 turkey; ½ cup coarse sea salt; 1 onion, chopped; 1 pound sausage meat; 1 apple, chopped; 3 sprigs parsley, chopped; 1 quart fresh breadcrumbs; 1 pound chestnuts, chopped; ¼ pound butter

Why it works: Parsley and chestnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 313 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stuffed Turkey with Chestnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Salt the turkey well.
Chop the onion, sausage meat, apple, and parsley together.
Mix in the breadcrumbs and chestnuts.

Stuff and cook

Stuff the turkey with the mixture and place it in a bag with the butter.
Cook for 2.5 hours.

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.

Parsley + chestnuttop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together313 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together25,843 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Apple + chestnuttop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together95 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).
Onion + chestnuttop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together696 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Turkey + chestnuttop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together136 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Sausage meat: Adds fat and savory flavor that keeps the stuffing moist and rich.
Breadcrumbs: Absorb juices and fat, giving the stuffing a soft, moist body.
Chestnuts: Add starchy body and a mildly sweet, nutty flavor to the stuffing.
Butter: Adds fat that promotes browning and moistness during cooking.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, onion, meat, parsley, chestnut, butter):

Avocadofits better
Lemonfits better
Coconutfits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, onion, meat, parsley, chestnut, butter. 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.