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Boiled Fowl with Oyster Sauce

A boiled fowl served with a sauce made from oyster liquor, butter, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,062 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Boiled Fowl with Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fowl

  1. Prepare the fowl as for roast duck, but do not stuff it.

  2. Place the fowl in boiling water to cover, adding 1 tablespoon of salt for each quart of water.

  3. Skim until clear and boil slowly until tender, about 15 minutes per pound.

Prepare the oysters

  1. Blanch the oysters by boiling them in their own liquor.

  2. Drain and wash in cold water.

  3. Set aside.

Make the oyster sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt 2 tablespoons of butter and stir in 1 ounce of flour until smooth.

  2. Gradually add the reserved oyster liquor and the chicken broth to create a sauce as thick as melted butter.

  3. Season the sauce with 1 teaspoon of salt, ¼ teaspoon of white pepper, and ¼ teaspoon of grated nutmeg.

  4. Add the oysters and serve over the fowl, garnished with chopped parsley.

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. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Butter and flour 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

Fowl
Is the main cooked meat, made tender by slow simmering in salted water.
Oysters
Provide the briny, savoury flavour that defines the sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries the flour's thickening with a rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquid.

The step that matters

Gradually add the oyster liquor and broth to the roux. Adding liquid slowly while stirring keeps the flour and butter mixture smooth, so the sauce thickens evenly without lumps.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, butter, flour, nutmeg, parsley):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, butter, flour, nutmeg, parsley. 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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