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Devilled Turkey's Legs

Devilled turkey legs served with a spicy gravy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Devilled Turkey's Legs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the legs

  1. Score the legs of the roasted turkey.

  2. Sprinkle with cayenne, black pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Boil the legs well.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a saucepan, combine gravy, butter, flour, lemon juice, port wine, mustard, vinegar, chopped chilies, mushroom ketchup, and Worcestershire sauce.

  2. Heat the sauce until hot and pour over the turkey legs.

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. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Lemon + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Port wine + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together598 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the sauce feel smooth and rounded.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the turkey legs.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth to the sauce.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavor that cuts through the richness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce.
Green chilies
Add heat and fresh, vegetal bite to the sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the sauce until hot and pour over the turkey legs. Flour needs to be heated fully in the liquid to cook out its raw taste and thicken the sauce. Pouring over hot legs keeps the sauce warm and helps it cling rather than run off.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, pepper, butter, flour, port wine, mustard, vinegar):

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, pepper, butter, flour, port wine, mustard, vinegar. 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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