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Turkey to Boil

A boiled turkey stuffed with bread, herbs, and seasonings, served with a butter‑cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Turkey to Boil

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare a stuffing by mixing bread, herbs, salt, pepper, nutmeg, lemon peel, oysters or anchovy, butter, suet, and egg.

  2. Stuff the turkey and secure the skin.

Boil and serve

  1. Dust the turkey with flour and boil it in a cloth to keep it white.

  2. For the sauce, combine butter, cream, and soy sauce in a pan.

  3. Pour the sauce over the boiled turkey 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Turkey + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together822 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey
Is the main dish, cooked whole by boiling and stuffed before cooking.
Egg
Binds the stuffing so it holds together when cooked.
Bread
Forms the body of the stuffing and absorbs the butter and suet.
Suet
Adds fat to the stuffing, keeping it moist and rich as it cooks.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Dust the turkey with flour and boil it in a cloth. Flour and a cloth help protect the skin during boiling and keep the bird pale. Boiling is gentle, so the turkey needs to be wrapped securely and cooked long enough to be safely done throughout.

“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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