Skip to main content
Main

Roast Fowl

Roast fowl stuffed with forcemeat, coated in butter and breadcrumbs, served with lemon sauce and parsley‑thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fill the breast of the fowl with forcemeat.

Roast and coat

  1. Roast the fowl until nearly done.

  2. Remove from heat.

  3. Pour lukewarm butter over it.

  4. Strew thickly with bread-crumbs.

  5. Sprinkle with more butter.

  6. Dip the fowl into additional crumbs.

  7. Return to the heat until it is a clear, light brown all over.

  8. Carefully remove from the spit.

Serve

  1. Serve with lemon sauce and gravy.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Bread + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

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

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

Fowl
Provides the main body of the dish, cooked through by roasting.
Forcemeat
Fills the breast, adding moisture and flavour as it cooks inside the bird.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and helps the crumb coating brown.
Bread-crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating on the outside of the bird.

The step that matters

Return to the heat until golden. The crumb crust browns only with sustained dry heat, but over-browning can scorch the crumbs before the bird is fully cooked through. Watch colour closely and check that the meat is done.

“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 roast chicken recipes

Stuffed 5Country 3French 3 See all 197 →

You might also like

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