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To Boil Turkey

A boiled turkey stuffed with bread crumbs, herbs, and anchovy mixture, served with optional oyster sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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. Prepare a stuffing with bread crumbs, herbs, salt, pepper, nutmeg, lemon peel, oysters or anchovy, butter, suet, and egg.

Stuff and cook

  1. Stuff the mixture into the turkey's crop and secure the skin.

  2. Dust the turkey with flour and boil it in a cloth to keep it white.

Serve

  1. Serve with oyster sauce made from butter, cream, and soy sauce, if desired.

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
Forms the main body of the dish and carries the stuffing while it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the butter and suet and help bind the stuffing together.
Egg
Binds the stuffing so it holds together during cooking.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the stuffing moist as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the stuffing and the optional sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling the turkey in a cloth. Boiling in a cloth with flour helps keep the skin pale. Cooking too hard can break the skin and let the stuffing escape, so keep the water at a gentle simmer.

“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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