Name: To Souse a Fowl
Ingredients: 1 hot roasted fowl, cut into joints; ½ teaspoon black pepper; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt'); 2-3 small onions, chopped; nearly 1 pint boiling water

To Souse a Fowl

A cold dish of roasted fowl cut into joints, seasoned with pepper and salt, covered with chopped onions and boiling water, and left to stand until cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription

From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients

Why it works: Pepper and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Souse a Fowl

Ingredients

1 hot roasted fowl, cut into joints
½ teaspoon black pepper
½ teaspoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')
2-3 small onions, chopped
nearly 1 pint boiling water

Directions

Prepare

Sprinkle the fowl with black pepper and coarse sea salt.
Add the chopped onions on top.
Pour nearly 1 pint of boiling water over the fowl.

Rest and serve

Cover with another dish and let it stand until cold.
To heat a cold fowl, place it in a saucepan for a few minutes.

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.

Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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 and moist as it soaks in the liquid.
Onions: Add aroma and savoury flavour that infuses into the fowl and the cooking liquid.
Boiling water: Provides moisture and carries the seasoning through the fowl as it stands.

“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.