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To Roast a Turkey with Oysters

A roasted turkey stuffed with oyster and liver mixture, served with a sauce of oysters, ham essence, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Roast a Turkey with Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Cut the liver into pieces and place it in a stew-pan with the washed oysters and their strained liquor.

  2. Add pepper, salt, bay leaves, mace, and butter to the stew-pan.

  3. Stew gently for 10 minutes.

  4. Remove the stew-pan from heat.

Roast the turkey

  1. Singe the turkey.

  2. Stuff the turkey with the oyster mixture.

  3. Cover the turkey with paper and spit it.

  4. Roast the turkey at a distance from a good fire.

Make the oyster sauce

  1. In another stew-pan, heat the essence of ham.

  2. Boil the second pint of oysters in water.

  3. Remove the beards from the oysters.

  4. Add the oysters to the essence of ham with a little lemon juice.

  5. Boil briefly.

  6. Once the turkey is done, pour the sauce over it before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Oyster + saucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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, cooked by roasting until done.
Oysters
Provide a briny, savoury flavour to both the stuffing and the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and when rolled in flour it helps thicken the stuffing.
Essence of ham
Gives the sauce a salty, smoky, meaty base flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich oyster and ham sauce.

The step that matters

Remove the stew-pan from heat before stuffing. Stewing gently and then stopping keeps the oysters tender; overcooking them makes them tough and shrinks them, so they lose moisture and flavour.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, oyster, pepper, butter, flour, ham, sauce):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, oyster, pepper, butter, flour, ham, sauce. 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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