Name: Turkey Soup
Ingredients: turkey bones; water; turkey meat; salt; pepper

Why it works: Turkey and meat work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 540 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Turkey Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Break the turkey backbone into 2 or 3 pieces.

Make the soup

Boil the bones in slightly more water than you want for soup for 1 hour.
Remove the bones and add the turkey meat, cut into very small pieces.
Boil for a few more minutes, then season with salt and pepper.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Turkey + meattop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together540 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Turkey + peppertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,636 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,777 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey bones: Release flavor and gelatin into the water as they simmer, giving the broth body.
Turkey meat: Provides the main protein and savory flavor in the finished soup.

“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.