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Cold Roast Fowl, a LA Mayonnaise

A cold roast fowl served with lettuce, watercress, hard‑boiled eggs, and mayonnaise dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cold Roast Fowl, a LA Mayonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Roast a young fowl until cooked through, then let it cool.

  2. Cut the fowl into joints and pile them in the center of a serving dish.

Arrange

  1. Halve the lettuce and arrange it around the fowl as a border.

  2. Wash the watercress and place it around the lettuce.

  3. Cut the hard-boiled eggs in half and place them with the whites facing up among the cress and lettuce, or cut them into rings for a decorative effect.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, cover the fowl with mayonnaise dressing.

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. Lettuce + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Egg + watercresstop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the main cooked meat that forms the centerpiece of the dish.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add rich, firm texture and a mild flavor contrast to the cold platter.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and creaminess, moistening the cold fowl and giving a smooth coating.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, watercress):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Welsh onionfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, watercress. 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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