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Boiled Turkey

A boiled turkey stuffed with oysters, bread crumbs, butter, and herbs, served with a creamy oyster sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and thyme are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,585 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Boiled Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Stuff and prepare the turkey

  1. Stuff the turkey with the oyster dressing made from chopped oysters, bread crumbs, butter, pepper, salt, thyme, and milk or water.

  2. Dredge a thin cloth with flour and wrap it around the turkey.

Cook the turkey

  1. Place the turkey in a pot of cold water with 1 teaspoon of salt and bring to a boil.

  2. Simmer the turkey for 3 hours, skimming the surface occasionally.

Make the oyster sauce

  1. For the oyster sauce, combine 1 cup of turkey broth with 1 cup of milk and 8 chopped oysters.

  2. Add minced parsley and stir in 1 tablespoon of flour mixed with cold milk.

  3. Bring the sauce to a boil and then pour it into a tureen.

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 + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Turkey + thymetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey
Provides the main body of the dish and the broth used for the sauce.
Oysters
Add briny, savoury flavour to both the dressing and the sauce.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and butter to form a moist, soft stuffing.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and moisture in the dressing and sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour mixed with cold milk before boiling the sauce. Flour mixed with cold liquid disperses evenly; added to hot liquid it clumps. Boiling then lets the starch swell and thicken the sauce smoothly.

Swap the thyme

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

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Sagefits about as well
  4. Thymethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, oyster, bread, butter, pepper, milk, 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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