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Fricassee of Fowls

A stew of fowls simmered in butter with onion, parsley, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,843 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Fricassee of Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowls

  1. Prepare and truss the fowls, cutting off the nails and removing the craw.

  2. Cut the fowls into pieces: legs, drumsticks, thighs, wings, and breast.

Blanch and drain

  1. In a stewpan, combine water, onion, parsley, and salt; add the fowls and blanch them. Bring to a boil, then remove the fowls and drain them on a cloth.

  2. Wipe the fowls clean and strain the cooking water through a gauze.

Finish in butter

  1. In a clean stewpan, melt the butter and add the fowls, cooking gently.

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. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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 gentle cooking in the stewpan.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and enriches the fricassee as it cooks gently with the fowls.
Onion
Flavours the cooking water used to blanch the fowls, adding aroma to the stock.

The step that matters

Blanching the fowls. Boiling the fowls briefly in seasoned water firms the surface and removes impurities, so the later gentle cooking in butter stays clean and tender rather than tough or cloudy.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter. 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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