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Pulled Turkey or Fowl

A stew of pulled turkey or fowl with butter, onions, turnip, celery, sherry, and optional cream or lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,418 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pulled Turkey or Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat and vegetables

  1. Remove the meat from the bones in strips using two forks.

  2. In a pot, melt 1 ounce of butter and sauté the onion, turnip, and celery until browned.

  3. Season the pulled meat with salt, white pepper, mace, and baked flour.

Stew the meat

  1. In a bright stewpan, melt 2 ounces of butter and rub the bottom with cut garlic.

  2. Add the seasoned meat and shake the pan until the butter is absorbed.

  3. Add enough strained gravy to moisten the meat and simmer for 10 minutes.

  4. Stir in the sherry and serve with fried sippets or macaroni.

White variation

  1. For a white dish, stew the bones and vegetables in milk and use cream instead of sherry, garnishing with lemon slices.

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. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. White pepper + macetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked turkey
Provides the main body of the dish as pulled meat that absorbs the butter and gravy.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor, and browns the vegetables when sautéed.
Baked flour
Coats the meat and thickens the gravy so the stew becomes cohesive.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic depth that brightens the rich, buttery stew.
Onion
Browns in butter to build savory, sweet flavor as the base of the stew.

The step that matters

Shaking the seasoned meat in melted butter. Flour-coated meat needs even contact with the butter so the flour hydrates smoothly later. Shaking the pan until the butter is absorbed helps keep the coating even and prevents clumps when the gravy is added.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, butter, onion, turnip, celery, mace, flour):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, butter, onion, turnip, celery, mace, 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.

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