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Boiled Fowl and Rice

A boiled fowl served with rice, seasoned with mace, onions, pepper, salt, butter, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Boiled Fowl and Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Truss the fowl as for boiling and place it in a stewpan with enough clear, well-skimmed mutton broth to cover it.

  2. Add the onions and mace, and season with pepper and salt.

Cook

  1. Stew gently for about 1 hour for a large fowl.

  2. Half an hour before it is done, add the well-washed and soaked rice.

  3. Strain the rice from the broth.

  4. Place the rice on a sieve to dry by the fire while keeping the fowl hot.

Serve

  1. Serve the fowl on a dish.

  2. Arrange the rice around the fowl as a border.

  3. Pour a little melted butter and chopped parsley over the fowl.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Rice + parsleytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,762 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender through slow, gentle stewing.
Rice
Absorbs flavour and sets into a firm border around the fowl once drained and dried.
Mutton broth
Cooks the fowl gently and carries its flavour into the rice.
Butter
Adds richness and a glossy finish when poured over the fowl.

The step that matters

Stewing the fowl gently. Keeping the broth at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil keeps the meat tender and prevents it from toughening or breaking apart while it cooks.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, onion, pepper, rice, parsley, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion, pepper, rice, parsley, butter. 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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