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Boiled Fowls

A boiled fowl dish served with ham, bacon, tongue, turnips, oyster sauce, parsley, butter, or liver sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,842 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Choose white-legged fowls for boiling.

  2. Add just enough water or veal stock to barely cover the fowls.

  3. Boil gently, avoiding cloths to maintain appearance.

  4. Skim the surface to remove impurities.

  5. Serve with accompaniments like ham, bacon, tongue, turnips, oyster sauce, parsley and butter, or liver sauce.

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. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Veal + livertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together392 recipes

    Shared aroma: enoic acid (butter, cheesy).

  3. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  4. Ham + oystertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Oyster + saucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,233 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

White-legged fowls
The main protein, which cooks gently in liquid to become tender and moist.
Veal stock or water
Cooking liquid that gently poaches the fowls and gives the sauce flavour.
Ham
Salty, savoury accompaniment that complements the mild flavour of the poached chicken.
Bacon
Adds smoky, savoury fat as an accompaniment alongside the chicken.
Tongue
Rich, savoury meat served alongside the chicken as an accompaniment.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the parsley sauce.

The step that matters

Boil gently, avoiding cloths. A hard boil makes proteins contract and toughen the meat and cloudies the liquid, so the fowls should simmer gently at a low bubble.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, oyster, sauce, parsley, butter, liver):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Onionfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, oyster, sauce, parsley, butter, liver. 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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