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To Boil Fowl with Rice

A boiled fowl served with rice, seasoned with onion, mace, pepper, and salt, and topped with gravy or parsley and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley 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 ↓

To Boil Fowl with Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Stew the fowl very slowly in the clear mutton broth.

  2. Skim the broth.

  3. Season the stew with onion, mace, pepper, and salt.

  4. Add the soaked rice about 30 minutes before the fowl is ready.

  5. Simmer until the rice is tender.

Prepare and serve

  1. Strain the rice from the broth and place it on a sieve before the fire.

  2. Keep the fowl hot.

  3. Lay the fowl in the middle of a serving dish.

  4. Arrange the rice around it without the broth.

  5. Serve with gravy or parsley and butter as a 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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  3. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  4. Rice + parsleytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,762 recipes

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

  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

Fowl
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender through slow, gentle stewing.
Rice
Absorbs flavour from the broth and softens into a tender side as it simmers.
Mutton broth
Carries flavour and moisture, cooking the fowl and rice in a seasoned liquid.

The step that matters

Stew the fowl very slowly. Gentle, low heat keeps the proteins in the fowl from tightening and drying out, leaving the meat tender and moist in the broth.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion, pepper, rice, parsley. 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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