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Boiled Fowl or Chicken

A whole fowl or chicken is boiled with water, parsley, and butter, served with boiled tongue, ham, or bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Fowl or Chicken

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Truss the fowl or chicken for boiling.

  2. Fold the fowl in a white floured cloth and place it in a stewpan.

Cook

  1. Pour hot water over the fowl until it is covered.

  2. Bring the water to a gradual boil, skimming carefully as the scum rises.

  3. Let it simmer very slowly for 1 hour if a fowl, or ½ hour if a chicken.

Serve

  1. When done, place the fowl on a hot dish and remove the skewers.

  2. Serve with boiled tongue, ham, or bacon 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.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Chicken + hamtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,497 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

  5. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

Fowl or chicken
Cooks gently in simmering liquid, so the meat becomes tender rather than tough.
Hot water
Surrounds the bird and cooks it evenly while it simmers.

The step that matters

Bringing the water to a gradual boil and skimming the scum. Heating the water gradually and removing the scum as it rises keeps the broth clear and the flavour clean. A hard, rapid boil agitates the proteins and toughens the meat, so the long slow simmer matters as much.

Swap the parsley

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, ham, flour. 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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