Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Fowl, with Parsley Sauce

A whole fowl boiled and served with a parsley sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Boiled Fowl, with Parsley Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Dip the fowl in hot water for 1 minute and rub it with a cut lemon to whiten it.

  2. Cover the breast with a slice of bacon and tie the fowl in a clean cloth.

  3. Place the fowl in a saucepan, breast side up, and cover with cold water.

  4. Bring to a boil, then simmer gently until cooked through.

Make the parsley sauce

  1. Wash the parsley in salted water, dip it in boiling water twice, and chop finely.

  2. Knead the butter with the baked flour and stir into the water from boiling the fowl.

  3. Simmer the sauce for 5 minutes, then stir in the chopped parsley.

Serve

  1. Place the fowl on a hot dish, remove the bacon and skewers, pour half the sauce over the breast, and serve the rest in a tureen.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

Whole fowl
Forms the main cooked meat, which is gently poached in water until tender.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Baked flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce as it simmers.
Parsley
Contributes fresh, herbal aroma and a green flavour to the sauce.
Fat bacon
Adds savoury fat that bastes the breast as the fowl cooks.

The step that matters

Simmer the fowl gently after bringing it to a boil. A rolling boil toughens meat proteins and makes the skin and breast dry and stringy. Gentle simmering keeps the fowl tender and juicy.

“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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes