Skip to main content
Main

Roast Turkey a LA Perigord

A roast turkey stuffed with truffles, bacon, garlic, bay leaves, and spices, then braised.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Roast Turkey a LA Perigord

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turkey

  1. Kill and clean the turkey thoroughly, tying up the vent.

  2. Chop and pound a fourth of the smaller truffles with enough fat bacon to form a strong paste.

  3. Mix in the remaining peeled truffles and sweat the mixture gently with garlic and bay leaves over low heat. Remove the garlic and bay leaves.

  4. Fill the turkey with the mixture through the neck opening.

  5. Sew the turkey closed.

  6. Hang it up for 7-10 days if the weather permits.

Wrap and cook

  1. Wrap the turkey in slices of bacon fat with parsley, thyme, bay leaves, shallots, mace, cloves, and peppercorns.

  2. Cover with strong buttered paper. Tie it up.

  3. Secure it on a spit.

  4. Braise for about 2.5 hours.

  5. Remove the covering. Drain.

  6. Serve with 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Thyme + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Truffles
Provide the dominant aroma and flavour that perfume the stuffing and the meat.
Fat bacon
Adds fat and moisture, keeping the chopped truffle paste and the turkey juicy as it cooks.
Turkey
Forms the main body of the dish, which is stuffed, wrapped and braised until tender.
Shallots
Add a mild, sweet aromatic flavour to the wrapping around the turkey.

The step that matters

Braise for about 2.5 hours. Braising cooks the bird slowly in moist, enclosed heat, so the meat becomes tender without drying out. Too much heat or too short a time leaves the stuffed bird tough or undercooked at the centre.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, truffle, clove, garlic, parsley, thyme, shallot):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, truffle, clove, garlic, parsley, thyme, shallot. 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.

You might also like

Turkey SoupTurkey Soup71 recipesTurkey StuffingTurkey Stuffing26 recipesTurkey DressingTurkey Dressing24 recipesTurkey PattiesTurkey Patties12 recipes