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Fowls a LA Mayonnaise

Roasted fowl served with mayonnaise sauce or English salad dressing and garnished with lettuce hearts and hard-boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,019 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Fowls a LA Mayonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble the dish

  1. Carve the cold roast fowls neatly.

  2. Place the inferior joints in the middle of a dish, if using.

  3. Arrange the other pieces around and over the inferior joints, piling them high in the center.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish with halved hearts of young lettuces and halved hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Just before serving, pour over the fowls either mayonnaise sauce or English salad dressing made with thick cream.

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. Lettuce + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Lettuce + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Egg + saucetop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,895 recipes

Egg and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,895 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

Cold roast fowls
Provide the main cooked meat, which is served cold and carved into pieces.
Mayonnaise sauce
Adds richness and moisture, coating the cold meat with a creamy, fatty dressing.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add a firm, mild contrast in texture and a rich flavor to the garnish.

The step that matters

Pour the sauce just before serving. Mayonnaise is an emulsion of oil, egg and acid that can thin, separate or become watery if it sits on the meat too long, and cold dressings lose body as they warm. Adding it at the last moment keeps the sauce thick and the lettuce crisp.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sauce):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sauce. 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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