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Broiled Fowl, and Mushroom Sauce

Broiled fowl served with a mushroom and ham sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Broiled Fowl, and Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Preheat your grill or broiler.

  2. Tie the fowl quarters onto a spit and roast until three-quarters done, basting with butter.

  3. Remove the fowl and finish cooking on a grill, seasoning with salt and pepper.

Make the mushroom sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine mushrooms, butter, diced ham, and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Cook gently on low heat for 30 minutes.

  3. Add coulis, lemon juice, and sugar to the mushrooms, stirring to combine.

Serve

  1. Serve the fowl on a dish, topped with the mushroom mixture.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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
Provides the meat, which cooks through over heat and is basted to stay moist and browned.
Mushrooms
Soften during gentle cooking and form the body of the sauce, adding earthy flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat for basting the fowl and cooking the mushrooms.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour to the mushroom mixture as it cooks.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness to balance the lemon and savoury flavours.

The step that matters

Cook the mushrooms gently on low heat. Low, slow heat lets mushrooms release and then reabsorb their moisture while softening, so they become tender and concentrated rather than tough, dry or scorched. Scorching on high heat can make the sauce bitter.

“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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