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Boiled Fowl

A young fowl stuffed with bacon, peppercorns, and salt, wrapped in dough, boiled, and served with bread sauce and green peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and peas work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 804 recipes. Both carry hexyl acetate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Boiled Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Clean and truss the fowl.

  2. Fill the inside with bacon slices, peppercorns, and salt.

  3. Make a stiff dough with flour and water, then roll it out to ½ inch thick.

  4. Enclose the fowl in the dough.

  5. Dip a clean cloth in hot water, sprinkle with flour, and tie it around the fowl.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil in water for 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the dough and place the fowl in a flat dish.

  3. Serve with bread sauce and garnish with boiled green peas.

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 + peastop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together804 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexyl acetate (fruity, apple).

  2. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Flour + peastop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,837 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Bread + saucetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,934 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and bread barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,383 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
The main meat, which cooks through while the dough and cloth hold it during boiling.
Raw bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the meat from inside the bird as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Forms a stiff dough wrapper that encloses the bird and holds its shape while it cooks.
Whole peppercorns
Add a sharp, aromatic flavour to the meat inside the bird.

The step that matters

Enclose the fowl in the dough. The stiff dough must fully wrap the bird so it forms a sealed case. Gaps or thin spots can let boiling water in or tear during cooking, which spoils the protective layer around the meat.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, bread, sauce. 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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