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To Boil Turkey

A boiled turkey stuffed with bread, herbs, salt, pepper, nutmeg, lemon peel, oysters or anchovy, butter, suet, and egg, served with oyster sauce.

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 Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. Put the stuffing into the turkey's crop and fasten the skin.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil the turkey in a floured cloth to keep it white.

  2. Prepare a rich oyster sauce with butter, a little cream, and soy sauce if desired, and pour it over 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. 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 body of the stuffing and soaks up butter and moisture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the stuffing and the sauce.
Egg
Binds the stuffing together so it holds its shape.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the stuffing moist and tender during cooking.
Oysters
Contributes a savoury, salty flavour to the stuffing and sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the turkey in a floured cloth. Wrapping the bird in a floured cloth shields the skin from direct contact with the water, helping it stay pale. Boiling too hard can break the skin and make the meat tough and dry.

“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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