Skip to main content
Main

Fricassee of Fowls

A creamy stew of fowl with butter, flour, herbs, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 the fowls

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

  2. Drain the fowls.

Make the fricassee

  1. Melt the butter in a stew pan.

  2. Stir in the flour until combined.

  3. Add salt, pepper, nutmeg, and sweet herbs to the pan.

  4. Pour in the cream.

  5. Add the fowls.

  6. Let them stew for 45 minutes, covered with buttered paper and the lid kept on tightly.

Finish

  1. 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 as it stews slowly in the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries the seasonings into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Cream
Adds moisture and a silky, rich texture to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they gently heat and add richness and colour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks and lemon juice. Egg yolks thicken when gently heated but scramble and curdle if the sauce gets too hot or boils. Add them off the heat or over low heat, stirring constantly, so the sauce becomes smooth rather than grainy.

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.

More chicken fricassee recipes

with Mushrooms 6White 6Cold 4with Tomato Sauce 3 See all 369 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes