Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Fowl

A young fowl is boiled with oysters and served with a white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Oyster and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,103 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook the fowl

  1. Fill the inside of the young fowl with oysters.

  2. Place the fowl in a jar and submerge it in a kettle of water.

  3. Boil for 1.5 hours.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Make a white sauce with the gravy from the jar, adding an egg, cream, or a little flour.

  2. Add oysters to the sauce or serve plain with the fowl.

  3. Garnish with parsley if desired.

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. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Oyster + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,886 recipes

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

  3. Egg + parsleytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,765 recipes

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

  4. Oyster + parsleytop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,211 recipes

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

  5. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Young fowl
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Oysters
Add briny, savoury flavour to the stuffing and the optional sauce.
Egg
Thickens the sauce as it cooks and gives it a richer body.
Cream or flour
Flour thickens the sauce, while cream adds richness and a smoother texture.

The step that matters

Boiling the fowl in a jar. The fowl must stay fully submerged and simmer gently rather than churn hard. Vigorous boiling can toughen the meat and break it apart, and the gravy collected in the jar is needed for the sauce.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, egg, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, egg, cream. 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

Mock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes