Skip to main content
Main

Roast Fowl

Roast fowl stuffed with onion and butter, topped with bacon, roasted slowly, served with gravy and watercress garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 533 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Roast Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick, draw, wipe, singe, and truss the fowl.

  2. Stuff the fowl with an onion and a piece of butter for added flavor.

  3. Tie the rasher of bacon over the breast of the fowl.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast the fowl slowly before a bright, clear fire, basting frequently.

  2. Once ready, strain the gravy and pour it under the fowl.

  3. Garnish with watercresses.

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 + watercresstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together533 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + watercresstop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Young fowl
Forms the main body of the dish and provides the meat that is roasted.
Fat bacon
Tied over the breast, it bastes the meat with melting fat and keeps it moist.
Butter
Stuffed inside the fowl, it adds richness and moisture as it melts during roasting.
Onion
Stuffed inside the fowl, it releases aroma and flavor into the meat as it cooks.

The step that matters

Roast slowly before a bright, clear fire, basting frequently. Slow roasting lets heat reach the thick centre of the bird before the skin over the breast over-browns. Frequent basting keeps the surface moist, so the meat stays juicy and the skin colours evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, watercress):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, watercress. 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.

More roast chicken recipes

Stuffed 5Country 3French 3 See all 197 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes