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Roast Fowl

Roast fowl is a whole bird roasted and served with optional sauces and side dishes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Roast Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and roast

  1. Clean the fowl thoroughly.

  2. For added flavor, place a small lump of salt butter covered with black pepper inside the fowl before roasting.

  3. Dredge the fowl with a little flour and baste well.

  4. Roast the fowl for 20 minutes, or 45 minutes for a very fine one.

Serve

  1. Serve with bread sauce, parsley and butter, or egg sauce.

  2. Accompany with mashed potatoes, stewed tomatoes, mashed turnips, dressed celery, lettuce, pickles, mangoes, currant jelly, stewed apples, or cranberry jam.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Provides the main meat, which cooks through during roasting.
Flour
Dusted on the skin, it helps the surface brown and crisp.
Salt butter
Melts during roasting, adding moisture and richness to the meat.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, pepper, bread, sauce, egg, potato):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Tarragonfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, pepper, bread, sauce, egg, potato. 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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