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Boiled Fowl

A boiled fowl served with white sauce, lemon, egg yolk, parsley, and fried bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Draw, singe, and wash the fowl.

  2. Cut off the legs at the first joint and the neck close to the body, leaving the neck skin.

  3. Loosen the skin around the legs and push them inside.

  4. Twist the pinions onto the back and truss the fowl with a needle.

  5. Draw the skin down over the legs and tuck in the tail piece.

  6. Tie firmly with the needle.

  7. Rub the bird with a cut lemon.

Wrap and boil

  1. Wrap it in buttered paper or cloth.

  2. Place the fowl breast down in a pan of boiling water.

  3. Simmer for 1 to 1½ hours.

Serve

  1. Serve covered with white sauce.

  2. Garnish with lemon, egg yolk, parsley, and rolls of fried bacon.

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 + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Fowl
Main protein that becomes tender and moist during long, gentle simmering.
Lemon
Rubbed over the bird, its acidity and aroma brighten the mild flavour of the meat.
Butter
Wrapping it adds fat that keeps the skin and surface of the bird moist during cooking.
White sauce
Served over the bird, its creamy richness adds moisture and balances the lean meat.

The step that matters

Simmer gently, do not boil hard. A gentle simmer cooks the bird evenly and keeps the meat tender. A rolling boil toughens muscle fibres, breaks the skin, and can leave the outside overcooked before the centre is done.

“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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