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Modern Cookery

A turkey stuffed with forcemeat, boiled in warm water with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Turkey and oyster work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 473 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turkey

  1. Remove the legs by cutting through the skin around the first joint and pulling them off.

  2. Wash the turkey thoroughly and dry it.

  3. Fill the breast with your choice of forcemeat.

  4. Truss the turkey by drawing the legs into the body and breaking the breastbone for a plump appearance.

Poach the turkey

  1. Place the turkey in a pot with enough warm water to cover it by an inch.

  2. Bring the water to a boil and cook for 10 minutes.

  3. Cool the water by adding cold water, leaving enough to keep the turkey covered.

  4. Skim off any scum that rises to the surface.

  5. Simmer gently for 1.5 to 2.25 hours, depending on the size of 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 + oystertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together473 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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 its meat becomes tender during gentle simmering.
Forcemeat
Fills the breast cavity, adding moisture and rich flavour as it cooks inside the bird.

The step that matters

Cooling the water before simmering. Adding cold water after the initial boil lowers the temperature so the turkey cooks gently. A hard boil toughens meat proteins and can break up the bird, so the simmer must stay gentle.

“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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