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Pullet with Onions

A young hen stuffed with a seasoned liver and bacon mixture, roasted and served with boiled onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Pullet with Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Mince the liver and mix it with grated bacon, parsley, green onions, and mushrooms.

  2. Season the mixture with pepper and salt.

Stuff and roast the fowl

  1. Stuff the mixture into the fowl's cavity and sew it up to prevent stuffing from falling out.

  2. Place the fowl on a spit, cover it with bacon, and wrap it in paper.

  3. Roast until done.

Prepare the onions

  1. For the onions, slice them and boil in water for 15 minutes.

  2. Transfer the onions to cold water, remove the outer skin, and boil them in stock until tender.

  3. Drain the onions and mix them with a well-seasoned cullis, then heat them on the stove before serving with the fowl.

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 + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Add moisture and earthy flavor to the stuffing.
Bacon
Adds fat and savory flavor, keeping the fowl moist as it roasts.
Liver
Adds richness and a firm, savory body to the stuffing.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, parsley, mushroom, pepper):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, parsley, mushroom, pepper. 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.

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