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Stuffed Turkey with Chestnuts

A turkey stuffed with sausage, apple, parsley, bread crumbs, and chestnuts, then roasted.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Stuffed Turkey with Chestnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Salt the turkey well.

  2. Chop together the onion, sausage meat, apple, and parsley.

  3. Mix in the bread crumbs and chestnuts.

Stuff and cook

  1. Stuff the turkey with the mixture and place it in a cooking bag with the butter.

  2. 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.

  1. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Parsley + chestnuttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together313 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Apple + chestnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

  5. Onion + chestnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together696 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 savoury flavour to the stuffing as it renders into the bread.
Bread crumbs
Soak up juices and fat, giving the stuffing a moist, tender body.
Chestnuts
Add a starchy, soft texture and a mildly sweet, nutty flavour to the stuffing.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the turkey skin brown and the meat stay moist.

The step that matters

Stuff the turkey with the mixture and place it in a cooking bag with the butter.. Stuffing packs the cavity and insulates the centre, so it heats more slowly than the meat. Keeping the stuffing loose and the turkey sealed in the bag helps the bird and stuffing reach a safe temperature together while staying moist.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

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

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