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Boiled Fowl

A boiled fowl stuffed with oysters, served with a white sauce made from the fowl's gravy, cream, egg, flour, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Boiled Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and boil

  1. Fill the inside of the young fowl with oysters.

  2. Place the fowl in a jar and submerge it in a kettle of water. Boil for 1.5 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. Collect the gravy from the jar, which is made from the juices of the fowl and oysters.

  2. Make a white sauce by adding the egg, cream, flour, and butter to the gravy. Optionally, add a little barley to the sauce.

  3. Add more oysters to the sauce or serve the fowl plain.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  4. Flour + barleytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together582 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Young fowl
Provides the main meat and the juices that form the gravy base.
Oysters
Add briny, savoury flavour to the fowl and to the gravy.
Egg
Helps bind and thicken the white sauce as it is added to the gravy.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce, giving it body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the white sauce.

“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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