Skip to main content
Main

Hashed Fowl

A hash made from cold roasted fowl, shallots, lemon peel, mace, ham, and stock, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Hashed Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Cut the cold roasted fowl into pieces as for a fricassee.

  2. Put the trimmings into a saucepan with shallots, lemon peel, mace, ham, and stock.

  3. Simmer for half an hour, then strain the mixture.

Finish the hash

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan, then add enough flour to dry it up while stirring continuously.

  2. Add the strained gravy and let it boil for one minute.

  3. Add the fowl pieces, then season with pepper, salt, and a dust of sugar.

  4. Before serving, squeeze in a little lemon juice.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Cold roasted fowl
Forms the bulk of the hash and supplies the meat that is gently reheated in the gravy.
Butter
Fat that cooks with the flour to form a roux, enriching the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks with the butter, giving the sauce body.
Lean ham
Adds savoury, salty depth to the stock used for the gravy.
Shallots
Add mild aromatic sweetness to the stock as it simmers.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the gravy that coats the fowl.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the butter. Flour must be stirred in continuously so it cooks evenly with the butter; if it is added in lumps or left unstirred, the gravy becomes grainy and lumpy instead of smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, lemon, ham, butter, flour, pepper, sugar):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, lemon, ham, butter, flour, pepper, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes