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To Boil Turkey

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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. Make a stuffing by mixing bread, herbs, salt, pepper, nutmeg, lemon peel, oysters or anchovy, butter, suet, and egg.

  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. Prepare a rich oyster sauce by combining butter, cream, and soy sauce, if desired.

  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

Turkey
Is the main dish, cooked whole by boiling so the meat becomes tender and fully cooked.
Bread
Soaks up butter and egg to give the stuffing body and a soft, moist texture.
Egg
Binds the stuffing ingredients together so they hold their shape when cooked.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the stuffing moist and rich as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to both the stuffing and the oyster sauce.

The step that matters

Wrap the turkey in a floured cloth and boil until cooked through. Boiling heats the bird gently, so it can stay moist, but it must reach a safe internal temperature throughout. A flour coating forms a protective layer around the cloth-wrapped bird, which helps it keep its shape.

“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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