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Fowl or Capon with Rice

A stew of fowl or capon cooked with rice, vegetables, and spices, served with a thickened sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,108 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Fowl or Capon with Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Prepare and truss the fowl.

  2. Place it in a stewpan and cover nearly with water.

  3. Add salt, pepper, thyme, bay leaf, cloves, mace, onion, carrot, and bacon.

  4. Let it stew slowly.

Cook the rice

  1. Take half the liquid from the stewpan to boil the rice.

  2. If there's too little liquid, add some stock.

Combine and serve

  1. When the rice is cooked, combine it with the fowl.

  2. If the sauce is not thick enough, add a little flour.

  3. Serve the fowl or capon on the rice with sauce around it.

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. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl or capon
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing in liquid.
Rice
Forms the bed for the fowl and absorbs the flavorful cooking liquid.
Bacon
Adds savory, smoky fat that flavors the stewing liquid.
Onion
Builds aromatic sweetness and depth into the cooking liquid.
Carrot
Adds gentle sweetness and body to the cooking liquid.
Flour
Thickens the sauce, giving it body when the liquid is too thin.

The step that matters

Stewing the fowl slowly. Gentle, slow simmering keeps the meat tender and juicy. A hard boil toughens muscle proteins and can make the meat dry, so the liquid should only simmer.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, thyme, clove, onion, carrot, rice, flour):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, thyme, clove, onion, carrot, rice, flour. 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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