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To Boil Turkey

A turkey is stuffed with a bread and herb mixture, then boiled and served with oyster sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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

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

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

Cook and serve

  1. Wrap the turkey in a floured cloth and boil it to make it very white.

  2. Prepare oyster sauce with butter, cream, and soy sauce, and pour it over the turkey.

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. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the body of the stuffing and soaks up moisture and flavour.
Suet
Adds fat to the stuffing, keeping it moist and rich as it cooks.
Egg
Binds the stuffing so it holds together rather than crumbling.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to both the stuffing and the sauce.
Oysters or anchovy
Contributes savoury, salty depth to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Wrap the turkey in a floured cloth and boil it. Boiling cooks the bird gently in wet heat, which keeps the meat moist and gives the pale, white colour the recipe asks for. Too hard a boil can toughen the meat and break up the cloth wrap.

“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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