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Sauce

Sauce for Boiled Fowl

A sauce made from boiled fowl soup, flour, milk, butter, mint, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Sauce for Boiled Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Take 1 cup of the soup the fowl was boiled in and stir 2 tablespoons of the soup into 1 tablespoon of flour until smooth.

  2. Pour the rest of the soup over the flour mixture in a saucepan.

  3. Add the ½ cup of milk and 1 teaspoon of butter to the saucepan.

  4. Place the saucepan on low heat, stirring constantly until it begins to boil.

  5. Add the minced mint leaves and salt to taste.

Serve

  1. Place the boiled fowl in a dish and pour the sauce over it before serving.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + minttop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together458 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

  5. Butter + minttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 soup and milk into a smooth, lightly body sauce when heated.
Milk
Adds creaminess and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, mellow body.
Butter
Adds fat for a rich flavour and a smoother mouthfeel in the sauce.
Soup
Supplies the main savoury flavour and liquid base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the soup. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps; mixing it first into a small amount of cold soup until smooth lets the starch disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens without lumps.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, butter. 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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