Skip to main content
Main

Roast Fowl

Roast fowl stuffed with bread, onion, pepper, mint, and butter, then roasted and served with a gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Roast Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Prepare the fowl as directed in a later recipe.

  2. Make stuffing by mixing the bread, onion, pepper, mint, salt, and butter.

  3. Fill the fowl's breast with the stuffing and secure it with a skewer or strong cotton.

Roast

  1. Heat ghee in a pan until bubbling hot, then place the fowl breast-side down.

  2. Rub salt all over the fowl and roast one side for a few minutes.

  3. Turn the fowl to brown the other side, then reduce heat and roast slowly for about 1 hour, turning occasionally.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. For gravy, add hot water to the pan used for roasting, season with salt, and pour over the fowl 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Pepper + minttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,372 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Bread + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Soaked and squeezed bread gives the stuffing body and moisture without making it soggy.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the stuffing, helping flavour carry through the bird.
Ghee
Its high smoke point lets the pan get hot enough to start browning the skin quickly.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma to the stuffing as it cooks inside the bird.

The step that matters

Browning the fowl in hot ghee. Searing the skin in very hot fat before slow roasting builds colour and flavour through browning. If the pan is not hot enough, the skin stays pale and the browning reactions are weak.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, onion, pepper, butter, ghee):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, onion, pepper, butter, ghee. 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 roast chicken recipes

Stuffed 5Country 3French 3 See all 197 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes