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Pullet with Onions

A stuffed fowl filled with liver, bacon, parsley, green onions, and mushrooms, served with a boiled onion ragout.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Pullet with Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Mince the liver and mix it with bacon, parsley, green onions, and mushrooms. Season with pepper and salt.

  2. Stuff the mixture into the fowl and sew it up to prevent stuffing from falling out.

Roast the fowl

  1. Cover the fowl with bacon.

  2. Wrap it in paper.

  3. Roast on a spit until done.

Prepare the onions

  1. Slice the small white onions.

  2. Boil them in water for 15 minutes.

  3. Transfer the onions to cold water.

  4. Remove the outer skin.

  5. Boil them in stock until tender.

  6. Drain the onions.

  7. Season well.

Serve

  1. Boil them a few times in a cullis before serving with the fowl.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  3. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

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

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

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

Liver
Adds richness and a moist, savoury body to the stuffing.
Bacon
Adds fat that keeps the fowl moist and flavours the meat as it cooks.
Mushrooms
Add moisture and earthy flavour to the stuffing.
Small white onions
Add mild sweetness and a tender texture to the ragout.

The step that matters

Sew up the stuffed fowl. If the stuffing is not securely enclosed, it can fall out during roasting. Sealing the cavity keeps the stuffing moist and inside the bird while it cooks.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, parsley, mushroom, pepper. 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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