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Boiled Turkey with Salt Pork

A boiled turkey served with salt pork slices and a white sauce made from stock, butter, and flour.

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 with Salt Pork

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and wash the turkey, then tuck the legs into the body.

Boil

  1. Boil the turkey in salted water for 2 hours.

  2. Add the salt pork slices and continue boiling until the turkey is done.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Make a white sauce using 1 pint of stock, butter, and flour to thicken.

  2. Serve the turkey with a slice of pork and a spoonful of the sauce.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Turkey + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

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

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey
Forms the main body of the dish and is cooked through by long boiling.
Salt pork
Adds savoury, salty flavour and fat that seasons the cooking liquid and the meat.
Butter
Enriches the white sauce with fat for flavour and a smooth texture.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a white sauce by swelling and binding the liquid.
Turkey stock
Forms the liquid base of the white sauce, carrying its flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the stock for the white sauce. Flour clumps if added straight to hot liquid. Mixing it smoothly with butter first, or whisking it in gradually, lets starch granules disperse and thicken the sauce 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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