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Fowl a LA Hollandaise

A stuffed fowl roasted with a forcemeat filling and coated in a thick batter, served with butter, lemon pickle or brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Fowl a LA Hollandaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the forcemeat

  1. Make a forcemeat by mixing grated bread, minced suet, onion or oysters, boiled parsley, pepper, coarse sea salt, grated lemon peel, and beaten egg.

  2. Bone the breast of a young fowl and fill it with the forcemeat.

Roast and batter

  1. Cover the fowl with a buttered piece of white paper and roast for 30 minutes.

  2. Prepare a thick batter with flour, milk, and eggs.

  3. Remove the paper and pour some batter over the fowl.

  4. Add more batter as it dries until fully crusted and golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with melted butter and lemon pickle or thickened brown gravy.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the forcemeat and set the batter so it forms a crust.
Flour
Forms the body of the batter that becomes the crust.
Milk
Moistens the batter so it spreads thickly and browns as it bakes.
Grated bread
Adds bulk and absorbs moisture in the forcemeat, keeping the filling tender.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the forcemeat moist and rich during roasting.

The step that matters

Add more batter as it dries. Batter poured over a hot bird sets and browns quickly, so re-coating it as it dries builds an even, golden crust. Letting the first layer dry out fully leaves pale or patchy spots.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, parsley, pepper, lemon, egg, flour, milk):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, parsley, pepper, lemon, egg, flour, milk. 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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