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To Boil a Turkey

A boiled turkey stuffed with bread, herbs, spices, and a few oysters or anchovy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 a Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Make a stuffing by mixing bread, herbs, coarse sea salt, black pepper, nutmeg, lemon peel, oysters or anchovy, butter, suet, and egg.

Stuff and boil

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

  2. Wrap the turkey in a floured cloth and boil it until cooked through.

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. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 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

Bread
Forms the bulk of the stuffing and absorbs moisture and fat.
Egg
Binds the stuffing so it holds together after cooking.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the stuffing, keeping it moist.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the stuffing moist and tender during boiling.
Oysters or anchovy
Adds savoury depth and salty, umami flavour to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Wrapping the turkey in a floured cloth. The floured cloth forms a protective crust that holds the bird's shape and limits direct contact with the water. Wrapping it too loosely or unevenly can let the bird break apart or cook unevenly while boiling.

“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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