Name: Boiled Fowls a LA Bechamel
Ingredients: 2 whole fowls; 1 pint Bechamel sauce; Boiled cauliflowers or broccoli for garnish; Stock (optional, for thinning sauce)

Why it works: Sauce and cauliflower work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 463 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Boiled Fowls a LA Bechamel

Ingredients

2 whole fowls
1 pint Bechamel sauce
Boiled cauliflowers or broccoli for garnish
Stock (optional, for thinning sauce)

Directions

Prepare

Truss and boil the fowls according to your preferred method.
Prepare 1 pint of Bechamel sauce.

Serve

Pour some Bechamel sauce over the boiled fowls.
Serve the remaining sauce in a tureen, thinned with a spoonful or two of stock if necessary.
Garnish the dish with boiled cauliflowers or broccoli and serve hot.

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.

Sauce + cauliflowertop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together463 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowls: Provide the main cooked meat that the sauce is poured over and served with.
Bechamel sauce: Adds a creamy, smooth coating that gives moisture and richness to the chicken.

“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.