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Fowl with Peas

A stew of fowl pieces cooked with peas, bacon, and herbs, finished with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 234 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fowl with Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Add flour until the mixture is stiff.

  3. Add the bacon and let it brown slightly.

Cook the chicken

  1. Cut up the fowl and add it to the pan.

  2. Moisten with gravy and mix well.

  3. Season with parsley, sorrel, young onions, bay leaf, and clove.

  4. Let it boil.

  5. Add the peas over high heat, skim, and serve the sauce over 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 + sorreltop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together234 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + sorreltop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Sorrel + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Sorrel + peastop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together169 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the butter and gravy into a stiff mixture that clings to the fowl.
Butter
Adds fat for cooking the bacon and flour together and gives the base richness.
Bacon
Adds savory, smoky fat that flavours the sauce as it browns slightly.
Gravy
Provides the liquid that moistens the mixture and forms the sauce.
Peas
Add sweetness and a fresh vegetable element to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Add the flour until the mixture is stiff. Flour thickens fat and liquid only when it is cooked and evenly mixed. If the mixture stays lumpy or too thin, the sauce will not coat the fowl properly and may taste of raw starch.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, parsley, sorrel, onion, clove):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Black-eyed peafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, parsley, sorrel, onion, clove. 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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