Name: Stewed Fowl
Ingredients: 1 old fowl; 2 quarts water; ¼ pound rice; salt to taste; thick white sauce made from cream

Why it works: Sauce and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,787 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Stewed Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fowl and rice

Boil the fowl in 2 quarts of water for 3 hours.
Add ¼ pound of rice and a little salt to the pot.

Serve

Remove the fowl and place it on a dish.
Arrange the rice around the fowl.
Pour thick white sauce made from cream over 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.

Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,787 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Rice + saucetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,396 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Rice + creamtop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,399 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl: Long simmering softens the tough meat of an old bird, making it tender.
Rice: Absorbs cooking liquid and softens, adding body and a starchy base for the dish.
Cream: Adds richness and fat, giving the white sauce a smooth, creamy coating.

“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.