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Rombo or Fowl in Salad Sauce

A salad sauce for cold roast fowl made with egg yolks, oil, vinegar, mustard powder, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,563 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Rombo or Fowl in Salad Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Bone the cold roast fowl or cut it into suitable-sized pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, beat the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Add oil, vinegar, chopped parsley, pepper, salt, mustard powder, tarragon, and onion to the egg yolks and mix well.

Coat and serve

  1. Dip each piece of fowl in the sauce to coat.

  2. Arrange the coated fowl pieces on a plate.

  3. Garnish with hard-boiled egg rings and sprigs of parsley.

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 + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mustard + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

  4. Pepper + tarragontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold roast fowl
Forms the main body of the dish, carrying the sauce.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Emulsify with the oil and form a thick, creamy sauce base.
Oil
Provides fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth texture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens and balances the rich yolk and oil.
Mustard powder
Adds sharp flavour and helps stabilise the emulsified sauce.

The step that matters

Add oil and vinegar to the yolks. Oil must be incorporated gradually and mixed well so the yolks can emulsify it; adding it too quickly or under-mixing can cause the sauce to split and turn greasy.

Swap the tarragon

The recipe marks tarragon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, vinegar, parsley, pepper, mustard, onion):

  1. Tarragonthe original
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Dillfits about as well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, vinegar, parsley, pepper, mustard, onion. 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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