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Turkey ‘a LA Daube’

A slow‑cooked turkey dish flavored with bacon, ham, aromatics, garlic, onions, carrot, and calf’s foot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Turkey ‘a LA Daube’

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turkey

  1. Singe and draw the turkey.

  2. Pluck it carefully.

  3. Cut the turkey in half.

  4. Separate the legs from the body.

Lard and season

  1. Lard the legs with fillets of ham.

  2. Tie the legs with thread.

  3. Remove excess bones from the breast.

  4. Divide the breast lengthwise.

  5. Lard the breast meat with raw ham.

  6. Season the breast with salt and spices.

Braise

  1. Melt the chopped bacon in a pot.

  2. Add the turkey pieces to the pot.

  3. Fry the turkey pieces for 20 minutes on low heat, tossing occasionally.

  4. Season the turkey pieces.

  5. Add the raw ham bone, aromatics, garlic, onions, carrot, and calf's foot.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Garlic + carrottop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,930 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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 provides the meat that is cooked slowly.
Chopped bacon
Melts to supply fat for frying, adding savoury richness and helping the turkey brown.
Raw ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour to the meat as it cooks.
Calf's foot
Releases gelatin during cooking, giving the finished sauce body and a silky texture.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, building aroma and depth in the base.
Carrot
Adds gentle sweetness and aroma to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Fry the turkey pieces on low heat. Low heat lets the fat render slowly and the meat brown evenly without scorching. High heat can burn the bacon fat and toughen the surface before the inside is tender, which spoils the flavour of the dish.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, ham, garlic, onion, carrot):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, ham, garlic, onion, carrot. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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