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Menu for a Party of Eight

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, stock, pounded fowl, and cream or milk and egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Menu for a Party of Eight

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour and add a little stock.

  3. Work the roux while gradually pouring in more stock and adding pounded fowl until exhausted.

  4. Bring the puree to a boil, then remove from heat.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the cream (or milk and egg yolk mixture) as you pour into a tureen.

  2. Serve hot.

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. Butter + coffeetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,442 recipes

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

  3. Flour + coffeetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,141 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Butter
Enriches the roux and adds richness and flavour to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a roux that gives the sauce body.
Pounded fowl
Forms the puree that gives the sauce its substance and flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the cream off the heat. Once the sauce has boiled, adding cream or an egg yolk mixture off the heat keeps the dairy smooth and prevents the egg from scrambling or curdling.

“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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