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Fricassee Fowls, Brown

A fricassee of fowl joints cooked in brown gravy with onion, mushrooms, mace, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 Fowls, Brown

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the fowl joints until browned.

  2. Add gravy, onion, mushrooms, and mace; let it stew until tender.

  3. Strain the mixture and remove the onion.

  4. Thicken the sauce with thickening and season with pepper, salt, 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. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the main protein, which browns on frying and becomes tender when stewed.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the flavour of the stew.
Mushrooms
Add savoury, earthy flavour and body to the stewed sauce.
Thickening
Thickens the strained liquid into a sauce with a coating texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce after straining. Thickener needs the liquid to be hot and well mixed to dissolve evenly; added to a cool or lumpy sauce it can clump and leave floury streaks. Adding lemon juice late keeps its bright acidity from being dulled by prolonged cooking.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, mushroom, pepper, lemon. 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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