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Stewed Fowl

A stew of young fowl and oysters, seasoned with flour, butter, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Remove the gills from the oysters.

  2. Fill the inside of the fowl with oysters.

  3. Place the fowl in a jar or tightly closed tin pail.

Cook

  1. Submerge the jar in a kettle of water and boil for 2 hours (longer if the fowl is not young and tender).

Make the gravy and serve

  1. In a separate bowl, mix flour with a small amount of water to make a smooth paste.

  2. Add the flour mixture, some butter, and more oysters with their liquor to the gravy from the fowl.

  3. Serve the gravy with the fowl, which will be very white and tender.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Oyster + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,582 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks, giving it body and a smooth texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, rounding out the flavor and smoothing the gravy.
Oysters
Add briny flavor and savoriness to the stuffing and the gravy.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour paste. Flour dropped into hot liquid clumps unless first blended smooth with a little cold water, so the paste must be fully smooth before it is added to the gravy.

“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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