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Minced Fowl

A savory minced fowl dish simmered in a cream and mace gravy, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Minced Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Remove the delicate parts of the fowl from the bones and skin.

  2. Cover the parts to keep fresh.

  3. Boil the bones and skin in ¾ cup of water until reduced by half.

  4. Strain the bones and skin.

  5. Cool the gravy.

  6. Skim off the fat from the gravy.

Make the sauce

  1. Place the fat in a clean saucepan.

  2. Add ¼ cup of cream, 1½ ounces of butter, 2 teaspoons of flour, a pinch of pounded mace, and grated lemon rind to the saucepan.

  3. Stir the mixture until it boils.

  4. Add the minced fowl and chopped hard-boiled eggs.

  5. Season with salt and white pepper or cayenne.

  6. Heat until just boiling.

  7. Stir in a squeeze of lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried bread slices.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, giving it a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the sauce.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and a soft, rich texture to the minced mixture.
Fowl bones and skin
Boiled down to make a concentrated, flavourful gravy base.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture until it boils. Flour needs to be stirred constantly as it heats in fat and liquid; otherwise it clumps and the sauce stays grainy and unevenly thickened.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, butter, flour, mace, lemon, egg, bread):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, butter, flour, mace, lemon, egg, bread. 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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