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Fowl with Its Own Gravy

A boiled fowl served with a savory gravy made from butter, lemon, herbs, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Fowl with Its Own Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the fowl as for boiling and lard it with bacon, ham, and parsley.

Stew and serve

  1. Place the fowl in a pan with butter, lemon slices, sweet herbs, cloves, onions, carrots, pepper, salt, stock, and white wine.

  2. Stew gently until the fowl is cooked through.

  3. Skim and strain the sauce, then serve it with 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. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Is the main protein, cooked slowly until tender in the braising liquid.
Bacon and ham
Larded into the fowl, they add savoury, salty flavour and some fat that bastes the meat.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the cooking liquid, which carries flavour and gives the sauce body.
White wine
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and helps lift the flavours of the herbs and meat.
Onions and carrots
Release sweetness and aromatic flavour into the stewing liquid, deepening the gravy.

The step that matters

Stew gently until the fowl is cooked through. Boiling vigorously toughens the proteins and makes the meat dry and stringy. A gentle simmer keeps the fowl tender and the sauce clear.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, parsley, butter, lemon, clove, carrot, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, parsley, butter, lemon, clove, carrot, pepper. 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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