Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Turkey

A turkey stuffed with a bread crumb dressing, boiled and finished with a butter‑egg yolk sauce.

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

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Boiled Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the turkey as you would for baking.

  2. Make a dressing by mixing bread crumbs, pepper, salt, hot water, and milk until soft.

  3. Chop parsley and add it to the dressing, or add oysters instead.

  4. Fill the turkey's crop with the dressing.

Boil and make the sauce

  1. Place the turkey in a pot of warm salted water and boil until cooked but not falling apart.

  2. Keep towels handy to wrap the turkey with strings for easy handling.

  3. In a separate pot, combine some of the boiling water with butter.

  4. Rub the yolks of hard boiled eggs smooth, then mix the yolks with the butter and flour.

  5. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over the turkey, garnishing with chopped eggs.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Turkey + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together822 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently in salted water until tender.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the hot water and milk to form a soft, moist dressing inside the bird.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded flavour.
Flour
Thickens the butter and egg-yolk mixture into a smooth sauce when brought to a boil.
Hard boiled egg yolks
Mashed smooth, they enrich the sauce and give it body and a creamy texture.

The step that matters

Bring the sauce mixture to a boil. Flour thickens only when heated enough for its starch to swell and set, so the sauce must reach a full boil; stirring keeps the yolks and butter from lumping.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, bread, pepper, milk, oyster, butter, egg):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Sagefits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, bread, pepper, milk, oyster, butter, egg. 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 boiled turkey recipes

with Oyster Sauce 11Eggs 4with Celery Sauce 4with Oyster Stuffing 4Celery Sauce for 3 See all 186 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesTurkey SoupTurkey Soup71 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes