Skip to main content
Main

To Dress Moor-Fowl, with Red-Cabbage

A stew of moor-fowl cooked with red cabbage, butter, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and port wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,499 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

To Dress Moor-Fowl, with Red-Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Truss the moor-fowl as for boiling.

  2. Put the moor-fowl in a pot with the soup and let them stew for 30 minutes.

  3. Cut the red cabbage into quarters and add it to the pot.

  4. Season the stew with white pepper and coarse sea salt.

  5. Roll the butter in flour before adding it to the pot.

  6. If desired, add the port wine.

Serve

  1. Remove the cabbage and place it neatly on a serving dish.

  2. Place the moor-fowl on top of the cabbage.

  3. Pour the sauce over the moor-fowl.

  4. Garnish.

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. Butter + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Cabbage + white peppertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Cabbage + port winetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Cabbage + buttertop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,397 recipes

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

  5. White pepper + buttertop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Moor-fowl
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing in liquid.
Soup
Forms the stewing liquid that cooks the bird and becomes the sauce.
Red cabbage
Forms the base bed under the bird and absorbs flavour from the stewing liquid.
Butter
Rolled in flour, it thickens the sauce and adds richness.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Roll the butter in flour before adding it to the pot. Flour coated on butter disperses into the hot liquid rather than clumping, so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of becoming lumpy.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, butter, port wine):

  1. Pepperfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, butter, port wine. 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

Red CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipesStewed CabbageStewed Cabbage58 recipesBaked CabbageBaked Cabbage51 recipesCabbage DressingCabbage Dressing19 recipes