Name: Roast Turkey
Ingredients: 1 plump young turkey (about 10 pounds); coarse sea salt; black pepper; dressing (for stuffing); slices of fat salt pork; water

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 ↓

Roast Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Clean the turkey and soak it in salt water overnight.
In the morning, sprinkle the inside with salt and pepper, stuff with dressing, and sew it up with cord.
Sprinkle the outside with salt and pepper, place it breast down in a pan, and cover with slices of fat salt pork.

Roast

Ensure the bottom of the pan is well covered with water.
Bake slowly at 300°F (150°C) for four hours.
Alternatively, cover the turkey with a thick paste of flour and water instead of pork, and baste often with drippings.

Serve

Cook the neck, liver, gizzard, and heart until tender, chop, and add to the gravy.
Serve with cranberry sauce or currant jelly.

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.

Turkey + porktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together830 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Turkey + peppertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,636 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Pepper + porktop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

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 cooks slowly to become tender.
Fat salt pork: Covers the breast, adding fat that bastes the meat and flavours the drippings.
Dressing: Fills the cavity, adding moisture and flavour to the inside of the bird.

The step that matters

Bake slowly at 300°F (150°C) for four hours. Slow, moderate heat lets the connective tissue and thick parts of the bird cook through and turn tender without the outside drying out. Rushing it with high heat risks dry meat and an undercooked centre.

“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.