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Boiled Fowls

A boiled chicken served with rice, onions, garlic, herbs, saffron, and lemon, seasoned with forcemeat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and saffron match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 538 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Boiled Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew 1 pint of rice in 1 quart of strong gravy until it begins to swell.

  2. Add an onion with 4 cloves and a bunch of sweet herbs.

  3. Stuff a chicken with forcemeat and let it stew with the rice until thoroughly cooked.

  4. Remove the chicken and stir in the rice, 4 egg yolks, and the juice of 1 lemon.

  5. Serve the fowl in the same dish with the rice, colored yellow with saffron.

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. Lemon + saffrontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together538 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Rice + saffrontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together629 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Rice + chickentop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Clove + saffrontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together455 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Onion + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rice
Swells in the gravy and forms the body of the dish.
Strong gravy
Cooks the rice and adds savory flavor and moisture.
Egg yolks
Enrich the rice and help it set into a creamy texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and yolks.
Saffron
Gives the rice its yellow color and a floral aroma.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks. Yolks thicken when heated gently but can curdle if the rice is too hot or boiling. Remove the chicken and stir them in off the heat so they enrich the rice smoothly.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, onion, chicken, egg, lemon, saffron):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, onion, chicken, egg, lemon, saffron. 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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