Skip to main content
Main

Minced Fowl, with Savoury Rice

A stew of minced fowl served over savory rice, seasoned with herbs, spices, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Minced Fowl, with Savoury Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Combine the fowl bones, skin, and rough pieces with water, onion, carrot, garlic, clove, sugar, salt, and pepper in a stewpan.

  2. Boil for 2 hours.

  3. Wash the rice.

  4. Boil the rice in a quart of cold water for 15 minutes.

  5. Strain and set aside.

Prepare the minced fowl

  1. Mince the fowl.

  2. Season the minced fowl with 1½ teaspoons salt, ¼ teaspoon white pepper, parsley, baked flour, chopped mushroom, and lemon juice.

  3. Put the minced fowl in a stewpan with enough gravy to moisten it.

  4. Simmer gently for 18 minutes, stirring frequently.

Cook the rice and serve

  1. In another stewpan, melt the butter with the rice and stir over heat for 5 minutes.

  2. Add the remaining gravy and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

  3. Serve the rice around the dish with the minced fowl in the center.

  4. Serve very 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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the meat and flavor base, with bones and skin enriching the gravy.
Rice
Absorbs the gravy and forms the soft, savory bed that the minced fowl is served on.
Butter
Coats the rice grains with fat, adding richness and helping them stay separate while stirring.
Baked flour
Thickens the moistened minced fowl so it holds together rather than running loose.
Mushroom
Adds earthy savory flavor to the minced fowl.

The step that matters

Simmer the minced fowl gently and stir frequently. Minced meat cooked too hot or without stirring can toughen, scorch, or stick to the pan, and the flour can clump before it thickens the mixture evenly.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, garlic, sugar, pepper, rice, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, garlic, sugar, pepper, rice, butter. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipes