Skip to main content
Main

Turkey Boned and Forced

A boned turkey stuffed with sausage meat, roasted and served with a gravy made from the bones, celery, peppercorns, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Turkey Boned and Forced

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turkey

  1. Remove all bones from the turkey except for the pinions, without opening the bird.

  2. Shape the turkey and fill it with sausage meat, starting with the legs and wings.

  3. Plump the breast and tie the turkey securely at both ends and the legs.

  4. Insert skewers through the body and wings, and secure with twine over the back.

  5. If using a cradle spit, support the turkey with a string across the back.

Roast the turkey

  1. Flour the turkey well and place it far from the fire until heated through.

  2. Baste the turkey continuously with butter while roasting for 1 hour and 45 minutes.

Make the gravy

  1. For the gravy, boil the bones in 1½ pints of water with salt, celery, peppercorns, and parsley.

  2. In a pan, brown the ham in butter, add flour and cayenne, then pour in the strained broth.

  3. Stew the gravy until ready to serve.

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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Turkey + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together540 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Meat + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Hen-turkey
Forms the main body of the dish, and its meat is the centrepiece served to guests.
Sausage meat
Fills the cavity, adding richness and moisture to the meat as it cooks.
Butter
Basting fat that promotes even browning and keeps the skin moist during roasting.
Flour
Dredged on the bird for browning, and stirred into the ham pan to thicken the gravy.
Lean ham
Browned in butter to build a savoury, roasted flavour base for the gravy.

The step that matters

Baste the turkey continuously with butter while roasting. Basting keeps the surface from drying out and helps the skin brown evenly, so the lean bird stays moist over the long roast.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, meat, butter, parsley, ham, flour):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, meat, butter, parsley, ham, flour. 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.

More stuffed turkey recipes

Oyster 24Chestnut 8 See all 65 →

You might also like

Cream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesTurkey SoupTurkey Soup71 recipesMeat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipesMeatballsMeatballs37 recipes