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Preserve

Stewed Turkey

A turkey stewed with mace, cloves, nutmeg, gravy, wine, ketchup, mushrooms, truffles, morels, and butter, served with fried French rolls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Stewed Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turkey

  1. Pound the mace, cloves, and nutmeg together and mix well.

  2. Fill the turkey with the spice mixture.

  3. Place the turkey in a small pot with skewers at the bottom to prevent sticking.

  4. Add the beef and veal gravy and cover the pot.

  5. Stew for 30 minutes.

Add the mushrooms and stew

  1. Add white wine, ketchup, pickled mushrooms, fresh mushrooms, truffles, morels, and butter rolled in flour.

  2. Cover and stew for another 30 minutes.

Make the oyster rolls

  1. Prepare fried French rolls.

  2. Strain the liquor from the oysters.

  3. In a saucepan, combine oysters, liquor, mace, white wine, and butter rolled in flour.

  4. Stew until thick.

  5. Fill the rolls with the mixture.

Serve

  1. Place the turkey on a dish.

  2. Pour the sauce over the turkey.

  3. Remove any fat from the gravy.

  4. Garnish with rolls or lemon and fried oysters.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Turkey + beeftop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together248 recipes

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

  5. Beef + vealtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 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

Turkey
Forms the main body of the dish and absorbs flavour as it stews slowly in the gravy.
Beef and veal gravy
Provides the liquid base that gives the stew its savoury, rich body.
Butter rolled in flour
Flour and butter thicken the sauce as it stews, giving it body.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and a meaty texture to the sauce.
Oysters
Add a briny, savoury flavour to the filling for the fried rolls.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the rich gravy.

The step that matters

Stew until thick. The flour-and-butter mixture must cook long enough to lose its raw starch taste and thicken the sauce. Too little cooking leaves the sauce thin and floury, while steady gentle heat prevents scorching and keeps the oysters tender.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, nutmeg, turkey, beef, veal, white wine, ketchup):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, nutmeg, turkey, beef, veal, white wine, ketchup. 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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