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Stuffed Turkey

A turkey stuffed with a seasoned breadcrumb mixture and baked with butter and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and summer savory match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 237 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Stuffed Turkey

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. In a bowl, combine the bread crumbs, pepper, salt, parsley, sage, and summer savory. Mix lightly with your hands.

  2. Add the hard butter in small bits and mix through the dressing.

  3. For added flavor, mince and add 2 apples to the stuffing.

Stuff and truss

  1. Stuff the turkey and sew it up.

  2. Cut off the neck close to the body, leaving a flap of skin to cover it. Skewer the neck flap down on the back after stuffing.

  3. Cut off the tips of the wings and skewer them down on the back.

  4. Remove ligaments from the drumsticks, leaving the large one intact, and skewer them to the tail.

Roast

  1. Rub the turkey with butter and dredge with flour.

  2. Place the turkey on its side in a meat rack.

  3. When the flour in the baking pan browns, pour in the water and baste the turkey.

  4. After 30 minutes, turn the turkey to roast the other side.

  5. In the last 30 minutes, place the turkey on its back to brown the breast.

  6. Ensure thorough basting for best results.

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. Sage + summer savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together237 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + summer savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together241 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Parsley + sagetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,445 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Absorb the seasoned butter and form the body of the stuffing.
Hard butter
Melts during roasting, adding richness and moisture to the stuffing and skin.
Flour
Dredged on the skin, it browns in the pan and helps colour the bird.
Water
Poured into the pan, it creates steam and drippings for basting.

The step that matters

Basting throughout the roast. Regular basting moistens the surface and carries pan drippings over the skin, which helps it brown evenly and keeps the meat from drying out during the long roast.

Swap the apple

The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, parsley, sage, summer savory, butter, flour):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, parsley, sage, summer savory, butter, flour. 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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