Skip to main content
Main

To Boil Fowls

A dish of boiled fowls served with white sauce or parsley and melted butter, garnished with French beans or parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and beans are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,080 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Boil Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Choose fowls with white legs and skin for the best flavor.

  2. Tie the fowls in a floured cloth.

Boil and serve

  1. Bring water to a boil and add the fowls.

  2. Boil large fowls for 45 minutes.

  3. After boiling begins, boil spring chickens for 20 minutes.

  4. Serve with white sauce or parsley and melted butter, garnished with French beans or parsley.

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. Flour + beanstop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sauce + beanstop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowls
Provide the main meat, which gentle boiling makes tender and moist.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the melted butter sauce.

The step that matters

Timing the boil by bird size. Large fowls need 45 minutes while spring chickens need only 20. Boiling the smaller birds for the full time would overcook and toughen their meat, while gentle boiling keeps the larger birds tender and moist.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sauce):

  1. Cashew nutfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Lentilsfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sauce. 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.

More boiled fowl recipes

with Oysters 9with Rice 9Cold Sauce 5and Rice 4with Oyster Sauce 4Lemon Sauce for 4 See all 58 →

You might also like

German Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes