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Fricassee of Fowls

A stew of fowls cooked in butter, flour, cream, herbs, and finished with egg yolks and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fricassee of Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the fowls in cold water for 2 hours to make them white, then drain.

Make the fricassee

  1. In a stew pan, melt the butter and stir in the flour until combined.

  2. Add salt, pepper, nutmeg, and sweet herbs to the mixture.

  3. Pour in the cream and add the fowls, then let them stew for 45 minutes.

  4. Cover the fricassee with buttered paper while stewing. Keep the lid on tightly.

  5. Before serving, stir in the beaten egg yolks and lemon juice.

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

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

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowls
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing in the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the stew.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Cream
Forms the body of the sauce and adds richness and mild sweetness.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce when stirred in near the end.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble and curdle if the sauce is too hot or boiling. Stir them in off the heat or at low heat, just before serving, and keep the sauce below a simmer so it stays smooth.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, nutmeg, cream, egg):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, nutmeg, cream, egg. 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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