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A Nice Way to Dress a Fowl for a Small Dish

A small stuffed fowl cooked in white gravy with a forcemeat of veal, ham, bacon, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,039 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk, wheat, fish (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Bone, singe, and wash the fowl.

Make and stuff the forcemeat

  1. Make a forcemeat by mixing veal, ham, bacon, egg yolks, herbs, suet, lemon peel, anchovy, salt, pepper, cayenne, breadcrumbs, and eggs in a mortar.

  2. Stuff the forcemeat inside the fowl and tie the neck and rump closed.

Stew and finish

  1. Stew the fowl in white gravy until tender.

  2. Add cream, butter, and flour; bring to a boil.

  3. Serve with a squeeze of lemon.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Lemon + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,039 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Beef + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Veal + beeftop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  4. Egg + anchovytop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Veal + anchovytop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together456 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

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 and provides the meat that cooks tender in the gravy.
Eggs
Bind the forcemeat so it holds together when stuffed and cooked.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb moisture and give the forcemeat body and a soft texture.
Cream
Enriches the gravy, adding richness and a smooth, silky texture.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the fowl and the sauce becomes body.
Suet
Adds fat to the forcemeat, keeping it moist and tender as it cooks.

The step that matters

Stew the fowl in white gravy until tender. Gentle, slow simmering lets the connective tissue break down slowly, so the bird becomes tender. A hard boil toughens the meat and can leave the stuffing dry or loose.

“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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