Skip to main content
Main

Fricassee of Fowl

A stew of fowl pieces cooked in a butter‑flour sauce with water, seasonings, and optional vegetables, finished with egg yolks and lemon.

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

Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Fricassee of Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Pick, draw, and singe the fowl.

  2. Cut the fowl into pieces.

  3. Soak the pieces in cold water for 1–2 hours to whiten the meat.

  4. Drain the pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and stir in the flour.

  2. Gradually add the water while stirring.

  3. Season the sauce with salt, pepper, nutmeg, parsley, and chives.

Stew and finish

  1. Add the fowl and let it stew for 45 minutes.

  2. When the fowl is two‑thirds done, add mushrooms, button onions, and artichoke bottoms if desired.

  3. Thicken the sauce with the egg yolks and add lemon juice and vinegar.

  4. To keep the meat white, rub it with lemon juice and cover with buttered paper while cooking.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender as it stews slowly in the sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and, with flour, forms the base roux that thickens it.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by binding with melted butter and absorbing the water.
Egg yolks
Thicken the finished sauce into a smooth, rich consistency when stirred in gently.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with the egg yolks. Egg yolks set when heated, so if the sauce boils after they are added it can curdle. Add them off the heat or over gentle warmth, stirring constantly, to keep the sauce smooth.

Swap the chive

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, nutmeg, parsley, egg, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits about as well
  3. Chivethe original
  4. Arrowrootfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, nutmeg, parsley, egg, lemon. 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.

More chicken fricassee recipes

with Mushrooms 6White 6Cold 4with Tomato Sauce 3 See all 369 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesArtichoke SoupArtichoke Soup55 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes