Skip to main content
Main

To Boil Fowl

A whole fowl boiled with salt, pepper, onion, and served with oyster, celery, or caper sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,433 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

To Boil Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the fowl and sprinkle the inside with salt and pepper.

Cook

  1. Place the fowl in a pot and cover with boiling water.

  2. Add 1 teaspoon of salt and the whole onion.

  3. Simmer until the fowl is tender, timing depends on its age and size.

Serve

  1. Serve with oyster, celery, or caper sauce, using some of the boiling liquid.

  2. Pour the sauce around the fowl or garnish with a border of rice.

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. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Oyster + ricetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Onion + oystertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,920 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

Fowl
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering in liquid.
Onion
Adds aromatic flavour to the cooking liquid, which is later used in the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer until the fowl is tender. Simmering gently rather than boiling hard keeps the meat tender and prevents it from toughening. Because tenderness depends on the bird's age and size, the cook must test it rather than rely on a fixed time.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, oyster, rice):

  1. Cucumberfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, oyster, rice. 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.

More boiled fowl recipes

with Oysters 9with Rice 9Cold Sauce 5and Rice 4with Oyster Sauce 4Lemon Sauce for 4 See all 58 →

You might also like

Rice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesSteamed RiceSteamed Rice48 recipesRice Griddle CakesRice Griddle Cakes28 recipesRice and Cheese CasseroleRice and Cheese Casserole23 recipes