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Roast Turkey

Roast Turkey is a whole turkey seasoned with salt, flour, and water, then sewn, tied, and baked with drippings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Turkey and flour work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 963 recipes. Both carry eugenol, which smells clove, spicy. The science ↓

Roast Turkey

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turkey

  1. Pick the turkey.

  2. Singe the turkey.

  3. Wash the turkey inside and out.

  4. Dry the turkey inside and out.

  5. Remove the crop from the back of the neck.

  6. Cut off the end of the neck.

  7. Salt the turkey inside and out.

  8. Stuff the turkey, leaving room for the stuffing to swell.

  9. Sew up the turkey with strong thread.

  10. Rub lightly with flour.

  11. Tie down the legs and wings.

Roast and make the gravy

  1. Add a little water to the dripping pan.

  2. Keep the bottom of the dripping pan covered with water.

  3. Bake until nicely browned.

  4. Baste often with drippings.

  5. Thicken the gravy with flour and water.

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. Turkey + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together963 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey
Forms the main structure and meat of the dish, which cooks through during roasting.
Flour
Rubbed on the skin and used to thicken the gravy, helping it brown and become smooth and thick.

The step that matters

Keep the bottom of the dripping pan covered with water. Water in the pan keeps drippings from scorching and smoking, and adds moisture to the roasting environment, so the drippings stay usable for basting and gravy.

“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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