Skip to main content
Main

Hashing Poultry and Game

A hash of turkey pieces simmered in gravy with lemon, mace, and thickened with flour, butter, egg yolks, and cream, served with toasted bread.

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

Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Hashing Poultry and Game

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turkey

  1. Remove the skin from the turkey pieces.

  2. Combine turkey, gravy, lemon pickle, lemon slice, and beaten mace in a stewpan.

  3. Boil for 6-7 minutes.

Make the gravy

  1. Thicken the gravy with flour and butter.

  2. Mix egg yolks with cream.

  3. Add the mixture to the gravy, heating gently without boiling.

  4. Strain the gravy.

  5. Pour the strained gravy over the turkey.

Serve

  1. Serve with sippets around the dish, garnished with lemon and parsley.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Turkey + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Turkey + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,636 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey
Provides the main meat, which is cooked gently in the gravy until tender.
Egg yolks
Thicken the gravy and add richness as they set gently with the cream without boiling.
Flour
Thickens the gravy, giving it body so it coats the turkey.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the gravy and helps the flour thicken it smoothly.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the gravy, softening its flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk mixture to the gravy. Egg yolks thicken when heated but curdle if they boil. Heat the gravy gently and stir constantly so the sauce becomes smooth and creamy rather than grainy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, lemon, flour, butter, egg, cream, pepper):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, lemon, flour, butter, egg, cream, pepper. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesTurkey SoupTurkey Soup71 recipes