Skip to main content
Main

Turkey

A stuffed turkey boiled in a floured cloth, served with oyster sauce and lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turkey

  1. Cut off the head and neck of the turkey.

Stuff and cook

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

  2. Stuff the mixture into the crop and fasten the skin.

  3. Boil the turkey in a floured cloth.

Serve

  1. Serve with oyster sauce made rich with cream or liver and lemon sauce.

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

Bread
Forms the bulk of the stuffing and soaks up moisture from the fat and egg.
Egg
Binds the stuffing so it holds together when cooked.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the stuffing moist and rich.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the stuffing.
Cream
Makes the oyster sauce rich and smooth.
Oysters
Contribute a savoury, briny flavour to the stuffing and sauce.

“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.

More turkey recipes

Roast 259Boiled 186Roasted 122Soup 81Stuffed 65Stuffing 51 See all 2 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes