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Boiled Fowl with Oysters

A boiled fowl stuffed with oysters, served with a white sauce made from the fowl gravy, egg, cream or flour, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Boiled Fowl with Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fowl

  1. Stuff the young fowl with oysters.

  2. Place the fowl in a jar and submerge the jar in a kettle of water.

  3. Boil for 1.5 hours.

  4. Remove the jar and reserve the gravy from the fowl and oysters.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. To make a white sauce, combine the reserved gravy with the egg and cream or flour and butter.

  2. Add more oysters to the sauce or serve it plain with the fowl.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Oyster + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Oysters
Flavour the fowl and the gravy, and can be added to the sauce.
Egg
Enriches the white sauce and helps it thicken and set when heated.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the white sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the white sauce.
Flour
Thickens the white sauce when used in place of cream.

The step that matters

Boil the fowl in a sealed jar. Submerging the jar in boiling water cooks the fowl gently and keeps its juices and gravy in the jar. The gravy is later used for the sauce, so the jar must stay sealed and submerged for the full time.

“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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