Skip to main content
Main

Baked Fowl

A whole fowl roasted with olive oil, parsley, onion, salt, pepper, bay leaf, and bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Baked Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the fowl in olive oil with parsley, onion, salt, pepper, and bay leaf for 2-3 hours.

  2. Remove the fowl from the oil and tie bacon slices around it.

  3. Place the onions around the fowl.

  4. Dip a large sheet of paper in the oil and wrap it around the fowl.

Cook and serve

  1. Grill, bake, or roast the fowl slowly until tender.

  2. Remove the covering and serve with sauce ravigote.

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 + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Olive + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 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

Olive oil
Carries the herbs and aromatics into the fowl and keeps the meat moist as it cooks.
Bacon
Its fat bastes the bird and adds savory flavor as it cooks.
Onion
Adds aromatic flavor to the drippings and the surrounding cooking space.

The step that matters

Cook the fowl slowly until tender. Slow, gentle heat lets the connective tissue break down while the muscle fibers stay juicy. Cooking too fast can leave the meat tough on the outside and dry inside.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (olive, parsley, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Eggplantfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, parsley, pepper. 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.

More roasted chicken recipes

with Bacon 4and Wild Pig 3Sauce 3 See all 67 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes