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To Boil Turkey

A boiled turkey stuffed with bread, herbs, and seasonings, served with a rich oyster sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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. Mix bread, herbs, salt, pepper, nutmeg, lemon peel, oysters or anchovy, butter, suet, and egg to make stuffing.

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

Boil and serve

  1. Wrap the turkey in a floured cloth and boil until cooked through.

  2. Melt butter, add cream, and soy sauce if desired to prepare oyster sauce.

  3. Pour the sauce over the turkey 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. 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
Absorbs the butter and suet to form a moist, cohesive stuffing.
Egg
Binds the stuffing ingredients together as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the stuffing and the sauce.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the stuffing moist and tender during boiling.
Cream
Makes the sauce smooth and rich.

The step that matters

Wrap the turkey in a floured cloth and boil until cooked through. Boiling holds the turkey at a steady wet heat, so it cooks through gently. The floured cloth forms a protective crust that helps the bird keep its shape and juices while it cooks.

“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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