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Turkey with Truffles

A turkey stuffed with truffles, bacon, butter, and seasonings, then roasted or stewed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Truffle and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,209 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Turkey with Truffles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the truffle filling

  1. Clean and peel the truffles.

  2. Chop half of the truffles finely with the bacon.

  3. In a pan, combine the chopped truffles, whole truffles, butter, salt, pepper, spices, and bay leaf.

  4. Cook on the stove for 15 minutes, then remove from heat and let cool.

Finish the turkey

  1. Stuff the turkey with the truffle mixture.

  2. Roast, stew, or prepare the turkey en daube like a duck or goose.

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. Truffle + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Butter + turkeytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

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

  3. Truffle + turkeytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together167 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + turkeytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,636 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Truffles
Provide the dish's main aroma and flavor, perfuming the butter and fat they cook in.
Bacon
Adds savory fat and salty, smoky depth that carries the truffle aroma through the filling.
Butter
Carries truffle aroma and keeps the filling moist as it cooks and sits inside the bird.
Turkey
Serves as the main protein, which the truffle filling flavors from inside as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cooling the truffle mixture before stuffing. Truffle aroma is volatile and fat-soluble, so gentle cooking and cooling keep it in the butter. Stuffing hot filling into raw poultry can also keep the bird in the bacterial danger zone for too long.

“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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