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Fowls with Truffles

A fowl stuffed with truffles, bacon, lemon, and onion, simmered in gravy and sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fowls with Truffles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Remove the skin from the fowl and bone it carefully.

  2. Season the sliced truffles with pepper, salt, and mace, then stuff the fowl and tie it tightly.

  3. Layer the bacon slices over the fowl, placing a lemon slice on each.

Stew and make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, combine the fowl, onion, carrot, and enough water to cover.

  2. Stew gently for 1.5 hours, then strain the liquid.

  3. Add the gravy and Harvey's or mushroom sauce to the strained liquid and simmer for 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the fowl with the sauce.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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
Provides the main body of the dish, becoming tender through long gentle stewing.
Green truffles
Contribute a deep, earthy aroma that perfumes the stuffing and the stewing liquid.
Fat bacon
Bastes the fowl with fat as it cooks, adding savory flavor and keeping the meat moist.
Rich gravy
Adds body and savory depth to the strained liquid, thickening the final sauce.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 1.5 hours. Gentle heat lets connective tissue soften slowly without toughening or drying the meat, while a rolling boil would make the fowl stringy and cloudy the liquid.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (truffle, pepper, lemon, onion, clove, carrot, sauce):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against truffle, pepper, lemon, onion, clove, carrot, sauce. 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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