Skip to main content
Main

Roast Turkey with Chestnut Stuffing and Sauce

Roast turkey stuffed with chestnuts, veal, salt pork, and spices, served with a chestnut sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turkey and pork work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 830 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Roast Turkey with Chestnut Stuffing and Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chestnuts

  1. Boil the chestnuts for a few minutes, then remove them from the boiling water.

  2. Rub off the dark skin from the chestnuts.

  3. Cover the chestnuts with boiling water and simmer for one hour.

  4. Mash the chestnuts finely.

Stuff and roast

  1. Clean the turkey and lard the breast.

  2. Chop the veal and salt pork very finely.

  3. Mix half of the mashed chestnuts with the veal, salt pork, pepper, sea salt, and stock.

  4. Stuff the turkey with the mixture.

  5. Truss the turkey.

  6. Roast the turkey as directed.

Make the sauce

  1. Prepare a chestnut sauce with the remaining half of the chestnuts.

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 + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together830 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Turkey + chestnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together136 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Pork + vealtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,930 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Chestnut + peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Chestnut + porktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together437 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Chestnuts
Their starch and mild sweetness give the stuffing body and a nutty, savoury-sweet flavour.
Veal
Adds a soft, tender texture and mild meaty flavour to the stuffing.
Salt pork
Adds fat and richness, keeping the stuffing moist as it cooks.
Stock or water
Adds moisture so the stuffing stays tender rather than dry.

The step that matters

Mix the stuffing before stuffing the turkey. The veal and salt pork must be chopped very finely and evenly mixed with the chestnuts so the stuffing binds and cooks evenly inside the bird. Uneven pieces can stay raw or dry out while the cavity heats slowly.

“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.

You might also like

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesTurkey SoupTurkey Soup71 recipesChestnut SoupChestnut Soup52 recipes