Skip to main content
Main

Roast Turkey or Chicken

A roasted turkey or chicken seasoned with flour, pepper, salt, and stuffed with bread and cracker crumbs, served with a giblet gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turkey and bread work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 822 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Roast Turkey or Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Pick and draw the fowl, then wash it well in two or three waters and wipe it dry.

  2. Dredge the inside and outside of the fowl with flour, pepper, and salt.

  3. Prepare a dressing of bread and cracker crumbs and fill the body and crop of the fowl.

  4. Stew the giblets in a saucepan.

Roast and finish

  1. Bake the fowl at 400°F (200°C) for 2 to 3 hours, basting frequently.

  2. Chop the giblets finely just before serving.

  3. After removing the fowl, add the chopped giblets to the gravy, thickening with a little flour mixed with water, and boil 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. Turkey + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together822 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Turkey + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together963 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey or chicken
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked through by roasting.
Flour
Coats the skin and thickens the gravy with a little flour and water.
Bread crumbs
Form the body of the dressing that fills the fowl, adding soft texture.
Cracker crumbs
Add to the dressing, helping it bind and hold its shape.
Giblets
Stewed, chopped and added to the gravy to add savory depth.

The step that matters

Basting frequently during the roast. Regular basting spreads fat and juices over the skin, helping it brown and stay moist while the long roast cooks the bird through.

“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 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesTurkey SoupTurkey Soup71 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes