Skip to main content
Main

To Boil Fowls with Rice

A stew of fowl cooked in mutton broth with onion, mace, pepper, salt, and rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,433 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

To Boil Fowls with Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fowl

  1. Stew the fowl slowly in clear mutton broth with onion, mace, pepper, and salt.

  2. About 30 minutes before finishing, add the soaked rice.

  3. Simmer until the rice is tender, then strain it off and place it on a sieve before the fire.

Serve

  1. Lay the fowl in the middle of a dish and arrange the rice around it.

  2. Serve with gravy or parsley and butter.

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 + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Pepper + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing in the broth.
Rice
Absorbs liquid and softens as it cooks, forming the starchy base served around the fowl.
Clear mutton broth
Cooks the fowl and rice gently, adding savoury flavour and moisture to the dish.

The step that matters

Adding the rice late. Rice cooks quickly and can turn mushy if it simmers too long, so it is added about 30 minutes before finishing to become tender without breaking down.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion, pepper, rice. 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.

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipesMutton SoupMutton Soup56 recipes