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Turkey, Boiled

A boiled turkey rolled with forcemeat or sausage meat, wrapped in bacon, and cooked in stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Turkey and meat work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 540 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Turkey, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turkey

  1. Cut the turkey down the middle into two parts and remove the bones without injuring the skin.

  2. Lay the turkey pieces flat on the table, skin side down.

  3. Spread a layer of forcemeat or sausage meat over each piece, about 1 inch thick.

  4. Roll the turkey pieces up like a sausage and cover with thin slices of bacon.

  5. Tie the bacon in place with twine.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook the rolls in stock until half covered.

  2. Remove the twine.

  3. Strain and thicken the sauce.

  4. Serve hot or cold.

  5. If serving hot, place on a hot dish.

  6. Pour part of 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. Turkey + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together540 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Young turkey
Provides the main meat, which is rolled and cooked whole in the stock.
Forcemeat or sausage meat
Adds a moist, rich filling that keeps the rolled turkey juicy as it cooks.
Fat bacon
Bastes the outside with fat and adds savoury flavour as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cook the rolls in stock until half covered. Keeping the rolls only partly submerged lets the exposed top brown and flavour develop, while the submerged part cooks gently in moist heat. Fully covering can make the meat waterlogged and bland.

“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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