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Blanquettes of Turkey

A creamy turkey dish made with stock, white sauce, cream, egg yolk, and optional cucumber and onions, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Blanquettes of Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Chop the turkey bones and cut the turkey meat into small thin slices.

  2. In a stewpan, combine the bones, onion, mace, and ham or bacon, and cover with water.

  3. Boil for 20 minutes to make stock.

  4. Prepare a white sauce using the stock as directed in another recipe.

Make the blanquette

  1. In a clean stewpan, add the turkey slices and cover with a little of the white sauce.

  2. Season with white pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg.

  3. Heat gently without boiling.

  4. Mix the cream with the egg yolk, then stir the mixture in quickly before serving.

  5. Pour the mixture onto a dish.

  6. Serve with triangular pieces of fried or toasted bread.

Prepare and add the cucumber

  1. Cut the cucumber into 2-inch pieces, split the pieces, peel them, and remove the seeds.

  2. Combine cucumber pieces with chopped onions, butter, and sugar in a stewpan.

  3. Stew gently until tender.

  4. Add the cooked cucumbers to the blanquette five minutes 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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. White pepper + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Nutmeg + creamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Turkey + hamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together303 recipes

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

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 gently heated so it stays tender rather than toughening.
White sauce
Coats the turkey and gives the dish its creamy, smooth body.
Egg yolk
Thickens and enriches the sauce when stirred in gently without boiling.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the sauce.
Onion
Flavours the stock with a mild, savoury sweetness.

The step that matters

Stir the cream and egg yolk in quickly without boiling. Egg yolk thickens by gentle heat. If the mixture boils, the yolk can scramble and curdle, leaving the sauce grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, mace, ham, white pepper, nutmeg, cream, egg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, mace, ham, white pepper, nutmeg, cream, egg. 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.

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