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Boiled Fowl

A whole fowl boiled with onion, carrot, celery, herbs, and salt, served with spaghetti and a sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Boiled Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stuff and truss the fowl.

  2. Tie it in a square of cheese cloth to prevent scum from settling.

  3. Place the fowl on a trivet in a stock pot or large kettle and cover it to half its depth with boiling water.

  4. Add the sliced onion, carrot, celery, peppercorns, bay leaf, thyme, and parsley.

Cook

  1. Cover and cook slowly until tender, keeping the water just below boiling point.

  2. Turn the fowl occasionally and add the salt during the last hour of cooking.

Serve

  1. Drain the fowl from the liquid.

  2. Remove the cheese cloth, skewers, and trussing.

  3. Serve the fowl on a border of spaghetti with Oyster or Celery Sauce or Sauce Soubise.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Forms the main protein, which becomes tender and moist through slow simmering.
Salt
Seasons the fowl and the surrounding cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Keep the water just below boiling point. A gentle simmer cooks the meat until tender without toughening its proteins or breaking up the fowl. A rolling boil makes muscle fibres contract and tighten, and can leave the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, celery, thyme, parsley, cheese):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, celery, thyme, parsley, cheese. 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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