Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓
Roast Fowl
Ingredients
Directions
Clean the fowl thoroughly.
Place a small lump of salt butter covered with black pepper inside the fowl before roasting to improve moisture.
Roast the fowl for 20 minutes, or 45 minutes for a very fine one.
Serve with bread sauce, parsley and butter, or egg sauce.
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.
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Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together85,593 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
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 its meat cooks through in the oven.
- Salt butter
- Adds fat and moisture inside the bird and carries flavour into the meat.
The step that matters
Roast for the right time. The time depends on the bird's size. A larger bird needs longer for heat to reach its centre, so too short a roast leaves the meat undercooked, while too long dries the flesh.
“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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