Name: To Roast Fowls
Ingredients: 1 whole fowl; Salt; Pepper; Butter or oil for basting

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Roast Fowls

Ingredients

1 whole fowl
Salt
Pepper
Butter or oil for basting

Directions

Prepare

Pluck and draw the fowl carefully.
Cut off the neck close to the back.
Insert a skewer in the first joint of the wing and bring the middle of the leg close to it.
Season the fowl with salt and pepper.

Roast

Baste with butter or oil during roasting.

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.

Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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 body of the dish, providing the meat that is cooked and served.
Butter or oil: Adds moisture and fat to the skin during roasting, helping it brown and stay tender.

“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.