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Sauce for a Turkey

A savory oyster-based sauce made with white gravy, lemon pickle, flour, butter, and thick cream for turkey.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Sauce for a Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Open the oysters into a basin and wash them from their liquor.

  2. Pour the settled liquor into a saucepan.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the white gravy and lemon-pickle to the liquor.

  2. Thicken with flour and butter, then boil for 3-4 minutes.

  3. Stir in the thick cream and oysters.

  4. Heat gently until hot, but do not let it boil.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Oyster + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Flour and butter 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

Oysters
Provide the main flavour and texture of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the flour thicken the sauce smoothly.
Thick cream
Adds richness and a smooth, mellow body to the sauce.
White gravy
Forms the savoury base that the sauce is built on.

The step that matters

Heat gently until hot, but do not let it boil. Once the cream and oysters are added, boiling can curdle the cream and toughen the oysters, leaving the sauce grainy and rubbery.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, flour, butter, cream):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, flour, butter, cream. 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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