Skip to main content
Main

Fried Fowl with Bechamel Sauce

Fried fowl fillets served with a hot béchamel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fried Fowl with Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Remove the flesh from the fowls, keeping it as whole as possible.

  2. Strip off the skin and slice the fillets into small thin scallops.

Fry

  1. Dip each scallop into clarified butter and arrange them in a frying pan.

  2. Sprinkle fine salt over the scallops and fry quickly without browning, about 3 to 4 minutes.

  3. Drain the scallops from the butter and pile them in the center of a serving dish.

Serve

  1. Sauce with boiling béchamel before serving.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Bread + hamtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Fowls
Provide the lean meat that is cut into thin scallops and fried.
Clarified butter
Fries the scallops quickly and adds rich flavour without the browning that milk solids would cause.
Bechamel sauce
Coats the fried scallops with a smooth, creamy sauce at serving.

The step that matters

Fry quickly without browning. Thin scallops cook through in minutes, so high heat for a short time keeps them moist and tender. Longer frying or browning dries the meat and toughens it.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sauce, bread, egg, pepper, ham, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce, bread, egg, pepper, ham, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes