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Boiled Turkey, with Celery Sauce

A boiled turkey served with a celery sauce made from stewed celery heads.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boiled Turkey, with Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Draw and clean the turkey, removing the angular part of the breast bone.

  2. Stuff the turkey with veal stuffing and truss it for boiling.

  3. Wrap the turkey in buttered paper and place it in a braising pan with carrot, onion, celery, and parsley.

  4. Add enough white poele or white stock to cover the turkey.

Boil and serve

  1. Set the pan on the stove to boil, then reduce heat to simmer until cooked through.

  2. Remove the turkey from the braise, discard the string, and let it drain on a napkin.

  3. Serve the turkey with a well-made puree of celery and stewed heads of celery.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 its meat is cooked gently by simmering.
Veal stuffing
Fills the bird and adds moisture and richness to the meat as it cooks.
Celery
Provides aromatic flavor in the braise and becomes the puree and stewed heads served alongside.
White poele or white stock
Provides the cooking liquid that gently moistens and flavors the turkey during simmering.

The step that matters

Simmer gently after boiling. Once the pan boils, the heat must be lowered to a simmer so the turkey cooks through evenly. A hard boil toughens muscle proteins and can break the skin and dry the meat.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, veal, carrot, celery, parsley):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, veal, carrot, celery, 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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