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Boiled Turkey

A turkey boiled with oyster stuffing, served with optional salted pork or bacon and a sauce.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and boil

  1. Fill the turkey with oyster stuffing and tie the legs and wings close to the body.

  2. Place the turkey in salted boiling water, breast side down, and skim the water often.

  3. Boil for about 2 hours, ensuring the skin does not break.

Serve

  1. Serve with oyster or celery sauce.

  2. Boil a piece of salted pork.

  3. Serve a thin slice on each plate.

Optional flour wrap

  1. Optionally roll the turkey in a cloth dipped in flour before boiling.

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. Oyster + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,255 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Pork + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Oyster + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Turkey + oystertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together473 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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, cooked slowly in water to become tender.
Oyster stuffing
Adds savoury, moist flavour as the turkey cooks around it.

The step that matters

Keep the water at a gentle simmer. A vigorous boil can split the skin, letting juices and flavour escape into the water and leaving the meat drier. Keeping the skin intact helps the turkey stay moist and well flavoured.

“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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