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To Boil Turkey

A boiled turkey stuffed with bread, herbs, spices, and a few oysters or anchovy, then served with oyster sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

To Boil Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

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

Stuff and boil

  1. Stuff the mixture into the turkey's crop and fasten the skin.

  2. Wrap the turkey in a floured cloth and boil it until very white.

Serve

  1. Prepare oyster sauce with butter, a little cream, and soy sauce, if desired, and pour it over the turkey.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the body of the stuffing and soaks up butter and moisture.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the stuffing moist and rich during cooking.
Egg
Binds the stuffing so it holds together when cooked.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel in the stuffing and sauce.
Cream (in the method)
Adds richness and smoothness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Wrap the turkey in a floured cloth and boil it until very white. Boiling too hard can break the skin and dry or toughen the meat. A gentle simmer cooks the bird evenly and keeps it moist, and the flour coating on the cloth helps protect the surface.

“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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