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Roast Fowl

Roast Fowl is a seasoned bird roasted with butter, breadcrumbs, and optional herbs, served with lemon sauce and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Fill the breast of the fowl with good forcemeat.

Roast

  1. Roast the fowl until nearly done, about 1 hour for a full-sized fowl or 25 to 35 minutes for a young chicken.

  2. Cover the breast with buttered paper for the first part of roasting.

  3. Remove the paper 15 minutes before serving to prevent over-browning.

  4. Pour lukewarm butter over the fowl and sprinkle thickly with bread crumbs.

  5. Dip the fowl into more crumbs and return it to the oven.

  6. Roast until it is a clear, light brown all over.

Serve

  1. Serve with lemon sauce and gravy thickened with minced parsley or other sauces.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Bread + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

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

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Forms the main body of the dish, and its meat cooks through during roasting.
Butter
Adds fat and moisture to the surface and helps the crumbs brown evenly.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden crust on the outside of the bird.
Forcemeat
Stuffs the breast, adding moisture and flavour to the meat as it cooks.

The step that matters

Removing the buttered paper. Taking the paper off 15 minutes before serving lets the crumb coating brown. Leaving it on too long keeps the surface pale, while removing it too early can over-brown the crumbs.

“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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