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Boiled Turkey

A whole turkey is boiled with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and optional sauces, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Boiled Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turkey

  1. Cut the legs of the turkey at the first joint.

  2. Draw the legs into the body.

  3. Fasten the small ends of the wings under the back with strong twine.

  4. Sprinkle the turkey with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the turkey in boiling water and cook slowly for two hours or until tender.

  2. Serve the turkey on a bed of rice and pour sauce over it, if desired.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Cauliflower + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + cauliflowertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,113 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Hen turkey
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow simmering in water.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the seasoned meat.

The step that matters

Cooking slowly in boiling water. Once the water returns to a boil, a gentle simmer keeps the meat from toughening, since muscle proteins contract hard under rapid boiling. Checking for tenderness near the two-hour mark avoids overcooking.

Swap the cauliflower

The recipe marks cauliflower as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, pepper, lemon, rice, oyster, sauce, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Cauliflowerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, pepper, lemon, rice, oyster, sauce, 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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