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Potjlet a LA Marseilles

A French fowl stew with vegetables, stock, and a brown roux, garnished with croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 10,172 recipes mention both. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Bone the fowl and cut it into 10-12 neat fillets.

  2. Reserve the giblets, back, liver, and bones.

  3. In a clean enamelled iron stewpan, heat the butter or beef dripping until it oils.

  4. Add the giblets, onion, peppercorns, bay leaf, mace, carrot, turnip, celery (or celery salt), and sugar.

  5. Fry for 10-12 minutes.

  6. Add ½ pint of stock and bring to a gentle boil.

  7. Simmer gently without reducing the stock.

  8. Tie the turnip and carrot stars in a piece of muslin and cook them in the stock.

  9. Strain the stock into a well-greased bag.

Cook and finish

  1. Season with salt and pepper.

  2. Add the fowl fillets.

  3. Simmer slowly for about 45 minutes at 300°F (150°C) until the fillets are cooked.

  4. Serve on a hot dish, garnished with vegetable stars.

  5. Thicken the cooking liquor with brown roux or the flour and butter mixture.

  6. Add the cooked mushrooms, heat thoroughly, and pour over the fillets.

  7. Garnish with a border of crisply-fried croutons and serve immediately.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together10,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Clove + macetop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,199 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together8,001 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together4,417 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,916 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
Provides the main protein, which turns tender and firm as the fillets simmer in the stock.
Butter or beef dripping
Fat that carries the aromatics' flavor during the initial frying.
Brown roux
Starch and fat mixture that thickens the cooking liquor into a smooth sauce.
Mushrooms
Add savory, earthy flavor and soft texture to the finished sauce.
Stock
Liquid base that cooks the fillets and forms the body of the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer without reducing the stock. A gentle simmer keeps the stock from boiling hard, which would concentrate it too quickly, make the sauce salty, and toughen the fillets.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, butter, onion, clove, carrot, turnip, celery):

  1. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  2. Thymebetter flavor fit
  3. Marjorambetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, butter, onion, clove, carrot, turnip, celery. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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