Name: Fowl with Tarragon, Boiled
Ingredients: 1 whole fowl; 1 liver from the fowl; 2 tablespoons forcemeat; 1 teaspoon fresh tarragon leaves (blanched and chopped) or ¼ teaspoon dried tarragon (finely powdered)

Why it works: Liver and tarragon work together. They rank in the top 28% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Fowl with Tarragon, Boiled

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

1 whole fowl
1 liver from the fowl
2 tablespoons forcemeat
1 teaspoon fresh tarragon leaves (blanched and chopped) or ¼ teaspoon dried tarragon (finely powdered)

Directions

Prepare the fowl for boiling.
Chop the liver and mix it with the forcemeat. Add the tarragon to the mixture.
Stuff the mixture into the fowl before boiling.

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.

Liver + tarragontop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together50 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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 is cooked by boiling until tender.
Forcemeat: Adds a binding, moist stuffing that holds the liver and tarragon together inside the bird.
Liver: Adds richness and a deeper, savoury flavour to the stuffing.
Tarragon: Contributes a distinct aromatic, slightly anise-like flavour to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Stuff the mixture into the fowl before boiling. The stuffing must be packed in before the bird goes into the pot, since it cannot be added once cooking starts. Loose packing lets the stuffing break apart or escape as the bird cooks.

“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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Fowl with Tarragon, Boiled