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To Stew Fowl with Rice

A stew of fowl filled with oysters and mushrooms, served with a creamy gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

To Stew Fowl with Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook the fowls

  1. Fill the insides of the fowls with oysters and mushrooms, and fasten with tape.

  2. Place the fowls in a covered tin kettle inside a large saucepan with boiling water, ensuring the water does not reach the top of the kettle.

  3. Boil for one hour, removing the lid occasionally to skim off scum, and replenish with boiling water as needed.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Once cooked, remove the fowls and keep warm, then take the gravy from the kettle into a small saucepan.

  2. Thicken the gravy with butter and flour, then add chopped oysters or mushrooms, minced egg yolks, seasoning, and cream.

  3. Boil the gravy for five minutes and serve with the fowls.

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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

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

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

Fowls
Provide the main body of the dish, cooked gently in the steam and liquid of the kettle.
Butter
Enriches the gravy and adds richness and smooth flavour when combined with flour.
Flour
Thickens the gravy by swelling in the hot liquid to give body.
Minced egg yolks
Add richness and help thicken and enrich the gravy as it is heated.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished gravy.

The step that matters

Keeping the water below the kettle rim. If the water reaches the top of the kettle, it can boil into the covered vessel and dilute the gravy and the fowls' juices, so the fowls cook in gentle steam and their own liquid.

“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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