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Roasting a Young Turkey

Roasting a young turkey with salt, pepper, flour, optional salt pork, and hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Turkey and pork work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 830 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Roasting a Young Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Clean and truss the turkey as you would a chicken.

Brown the turkey

  1. Place the turkey on a rack under the broiler to brown for 30 to 40 minutes, watching carefully.

  2. If using a baking oven, heat it to 400°F (200°C) and brown the turkey on a rack with a drip pan underneath.

  3. Once browned, place the turkey breast down in a baking pan.

  4. To prevent the back from browning too much, cover it with soaked salt pork or a thick dough batter.

Roast

  1. Pour any liquid from the searing into the roasting pan.

  2. Add a little hot water.

  3. Season the turkey with salt and pepper.

  4. Sprinkle flour over the turkey.

  5. Cover the roaster.

  6. Bake at 350°F (175°C).

  7. Baste the turkey regularly until fully cooked.

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 + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together830 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Turkey + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,636 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Pepper + porktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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

Young turkey
Provides the main body of meat that is browned and then roasted until cooked through.
Flour
Sprinkled over the bird, it helps form a light browned crust on the skin.
Soaked salt pork
Laid over the back as a shield, it slows browning there while the rest of the bird cooks.

The step that matters

Covering the back while browning. The back has thinner skin and more exposed surface, so it darkens faster than the breast. Covering it with salt pork or dough slows browning there so the bird finishes evenly and does not scorch.

“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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