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Braised Roast Turkey, Capon, or Fowl

A braised roast turkey, capon, or fowl cooked with onions, carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, bay leaves, oil, bacon, lemon, and fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Braised Roast Turkey, Capon, or Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and wash the onions, carrot, and turnip, then slice them thinly.

  2. Add the celery and parsley, and lay the vegetables on three sheets of paper.

  3. Pour the oil over the vegetables.

Wrap and roast

  1. Cover the turkey or capon breast with bacon slices and place it on the vegetables.

  2. Lay lemon slices on the breast to keep it white, then tie the paper around with string.

  3. Pass a spit through the bird and set it before the fire.

  4. Pour plenty of fat over the bird to moisten the paper and prevent burning.

  5. Roast for 3 hours at a distance from the fire; capons take 2 hours, poulardes 1.5 hours, fowls 1 hour, and chickens 30 minutes.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey or capon
Provides the main meat, which cooks slowly inside its paper wrapping until tender.
Bacon
Lies over the breast, adding fat that bastes the meat and keeps it moist.
Onions
Form a bed of aromatic vegetables that flavour the drippings and the bird.
Oil
Helps the vegetables brown slightly and carries their flavour into the wrapping.

The step that matters

Keep the paper moist with fat and keep the bird at a distance from the fire. The paper can scorch and burn if it dries out, so plenty of fat keeps it moist. Cooking at a distance from the fire lets the heat penetrate gently so the meat cooks through before the outside darkens too much.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, turkey, lemon):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, turkey, lemon. 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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