Skip to main content
Main

Turkey Warmed Over

A dish of cold turkey or chicken warmed with butter, milk, gravy, and flour, served over bread or biscuits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Turkey Warmed Over

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Warm the meat

  1. Warm the pieces of cold turkey or chicken in a frying pan with butter.

  2. Place the warmed pieces on a warm platter and surround them with halved bread or biscuits dipped in hot salted water.

  3. Put the platter in a warm oven with the door open.

Make the gravy

  1. In the frying pan, add butter, milk, and leftover gravy; bring to a boil.

  2. Mix flour with a little cold milk or water to make a cream-like consistency; add to the pan.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and add finely chopped dark meat.

  4. Cook the sauce for a few moments, then pour over the biscuits and fowl.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the milk and gravy sauce so it clings to the meat and bread.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding body and a mild creaminess.
Leftover gravy
Adds savory depth and flavor to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the warmed meat and the sauce.
Dark meat
Adds deeper flavor to the sauce when finely chopped and stirred in.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce with flour. Flour mixed with cold liquid first disperses evenly; added directly to hot liquid it clumps. Cooking the sauce for a few moments after adding it lets the starch swell fully and thicken.

“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.

You might also like

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