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Potted Fowl

A stew of cold roasted or boiled fowl meat simmered with bones, water, seasoning, parsley, onion, flour, butter, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,843 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Potted Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Remove all the meat from the cold roasted or boiled fowl using a fork and place it in a stewpan.

  2. In another pan, combine the small beaten bones with ½ pint of water, seasoning, parsley, and onion if using.

  3. Simmer until the liquid is reduced by half, then strain it and add to the meat.

Finish the mixture

  1. Mix the flour and butter together, then add to the stewpan along with the salt and sugar.

  2. Boil for 2 minutes, adding more water or broth if the mixture is too thick.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, spreadable mixture as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth texture, and helps the flour blend in.
Fowl
Supplies the meat that forms the body of the potted dish.

The step that matters

Boiling after adding the flour and butter. Flour thickens only when it boils and its starch swells in the hot liquid. Boiling for the full time cooks out the raw flour taste and sets the texture. Adding liquid if it gets too thick keeps it spreadable.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, parsley, flour, butter, sugar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, parsley, flour, butter, sugar. 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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