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Boiled Fowls

A boiled fowl served with optional sauce and boiled cauliflower or vegetable marrow.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and cauliflower match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 233 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Boiled Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Truss the fowl firmly with legs drawn into the body and wings over the back.

Cook

  1. Heat water until hot but not boiling, then add the fowl.

  2. Simmer a full-sized fowl for about 45 minutes; young chickens for 20 to 25 minutes.

  3. Remove any scum that gathers on the surface of the water carefully.

Serve

  1. Serve with your choice of sauce and garnish with boiled cauliflower or halved vegetable marrow.

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 + cauliflowertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the meat, which becomes tender and moist during gentle simmering in water.
Water
Cooks the fowl evenly by gentle heat transfer, keeping the meat moist rather than seared.

The step that matters

Keep the water hot but not boiling. A gentle simmer cooks the meat evenly and keeps it tender. A hard boil toughens the muscle fibres and breaks up the scum into the liquid, making the broth cloudy.

“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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