Skip to main content
Main

A LA Provengale

A roast fowl cooked with onions, parsley, oil or cream, bay leaves, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and 25,834 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare

  1. Half roast the fowl and cut it into pieces.

  2. In a stewpan, layer a bed of onions and parsley, then add the fowl pieces until all ingredients are used.

  3. Add oil or cream, bay leaves, and salt.

Cook

  1. Let the mixture simmer slowly.

Serve

  1. Dish the fowl.

  2. Place the onions in the middle.

  3. Add a little sauce.

  4. Serve.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Onion + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together25,834 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together10,826 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Parsley + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together6,391 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Onion and cream share little aroma chemistry, yet 10,826 recipes mention both: they likely 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 meat, which becomes tender as it simmers slowly with the onions.
Onions
Soften during slow simmering, becoming sweet and forming the bed beneath the fowl.
Oil or cream
Adds fat and moisture, enriching the sauce and keeping the meat from drying out.

The step that matters

Let the mixture simmer slowly. Gentle, low heat lets the fowl and onions cook through and become tender without toughening the meat or scorching the oil or cream. Rushing with high heat can dry the meat and break the sauce.

Flavor stand-ins for the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, cream):

  1. Garlicbetter flavor fit
  2. Celerybetter flavor fit
  3. Macebetter flavor fit
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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

Illustration of Tomato SoupIllustrationTomato Soup526 recipesIllustration of Brown BreadIllustrationBrown Bread461 recipesIllustration of Mutton BrothIllustrationMutton Broth292 recipesIllustration of Yorkshire PuddingIllustrationYorkshire Pudding264 recipes