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Minced Fowls

A savory dish of minced roasted or boiled fowl mixed with cream, butter, flour, and eggs, served over hot toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Minced Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove all flesh from the bones of the cold roast or boiled fowl and clean it from the skin.

  2. Keep covered until ready to use.

  3. Boil the bones and skin in ½ pint of water until reduced by half.

  4. Strain the gravy and let it cool.

Make the sauce

  1. Skim off the fat from the gravy and put it into a clean saucepan with ½ cup cream and 3 ounces of butter mixed with 1 tablespoon flour.

  2. Stir the mixture until it boils, then add the minced fowl and chopped hard-boiled eggs.

  3. Season with salt and pepper, and heat until just ready to boil.

Serve

  1. Serve the mixture on hot toast.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, adding richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cream and gravy mixture into a smooth, coating sauce.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the sauce's texture.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and a soft, creamy texture to the minced mixture.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour into the butter and cream before boiling. Flour thickens only when heated with liquid and stirred, so lumps form if it is added to hot liquid without being well blended first. Stirring until the mixture boils lets the starch swell evenly into a smooth sauce.

“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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