Name: Guinea Fowl
Ingredients: 1 young Guinea-hen; slices of bacon; watercress; bread sauce; gravy

Why it works: Watercress and bread work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Guinea Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Wrap the Guinea-hen in slices of bacon.
Roast it at 400°F (200°C) for 1 to 1¼ hours.
Serve with watercress, bread sauce, and gravy separately.

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.

Watercress + breadtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together307 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Watercress + saucetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together295 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Bread + saucetop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,934 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Guinea-hen: Provides the main lean meat that is roasted whole.
Bacon: Wrapped around the bird, it bastes the meat with fat and adds savoury flavour as it cooks.

“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.