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Minced Turkey with Poached Eggs

A toast topped with minced turkey, stuffing, and poached eggs, seasoned with butter, flour, stock, salt, pepper, and onion juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Minced Turkey with Poached Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine chopped turkey and finely chopped stuffing.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt butter over medium heat.

  2. Add flour to the melted butter and brown well.

  3. Slowly stir in turkey stock and season with salt, pepper, and onion juice.

  4. Reheat the turkey and stuffing mixture in the sauce.

Serve

  1. Serve the mixture on circles of toast with a poached egg on top.

  2. Garnish with parsley.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 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

Cold roast turkey
Forms the main body of the filling and provides the meaty substance of the dish.
Stuffing
Adds bready texture and seasoned flavour to the filling.
Butter
Provides fat for cooking the flour and gives the sauce a rich flavour.
Flour
Browned in butter, it thickens the turkey stock into a smooth sauce.
Turkey stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and moistens the turkey and stuffing.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in butter. Cooking the flour in melted butter until well browned develops nutty flavour and colour, and cooking out the raw starch taste before the stock is added helps prevent a pasty or floury sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, butter, flour, pepper, egg, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, butter, flour, pepper, egg, parsley. 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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