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Sauce a LA Italienne

A rich sauce made from braised fowls, ham, stock, and cream, served over poultry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 9,057 recipes mention both. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare and braise the fowls

  1. Bone the fowls and fill them with stuffing.

  2. Place the bones and any other poultry trimmings in a stewpan with raw ham, onions, thyme, parsley, mace, stock, and bay leaves.

  3. Add the fowls to the stewpan.

  4. Cover the fowls with bacon and white paper.

  5. Simmer gently on a slow stove for 1 hour.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour the cooking liquid into a basin.

  2. Skim off the fat from the liquid.

  3. Melt butter in a stewpan.

  4. Add enough flour to make a roux.

  5. Stir in the skimmed liquid and boiled cream.

  6. Heat while stirring until it boils.

  7. Strain the sauce through a tammy.

Serve

  1. Remove the fowls and place them on a clean cloth to absorb excess fat.

  2. Arrange the fowls on a dish.

  3. Pour some sauce over them.

  4. Garnish with paste or croutons.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Butter + creamtop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together41,494 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + macetop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,113 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Parsley + macetop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Onion + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together11,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowls
Provide the main body of meat, which becomes tender through slow simmering.
Bones of the fowls
Release gelatin and flavour into the stock, giving the sauce more body.
Stock
Forms the cooking liquid that becomes the base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and is the fat used to start the roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter to form a roux.
Double cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Skim off the fat from the liquid. Fat left in the cooking liquid will make the sauce greasy and can keep the roux and cream from blending smoothly, so the liquid should be skimmed well before it is thickened.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, onion, thyme, parsley, butter, flour, cream):

  1. Marjorambetter flavor fit
  2. Celerybetter flavor fit
  3. Garlicbetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, onion, thyme, parsley, butter, flour, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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