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Fricassee of Fowl

A stew of fowl cooked with onions, herbs, butter, flour, ham, mushrooms, and cream, finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 234 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fricassee of Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Place the fowl in a jar with sliced onion, parsley, and salt.

  2. Add butter rolled in flour.

  3. Cover with water in a kettle.

  4. Cook until three-quarters done.

  5. Skim the liquid.

  6. Strain the liquid.

  7. Dry the fowl.

Make the sauce and finish

  1. Place it in a stewpan with butter and ham.

  2. Sprinkle in flour.

  3. Shake until browned.

  4. Add the reserved liquid, parsley, young onions, bay leaf, clove, sorrel, and mushrooms.

  5. Skim the mixture.

  6. Let it stew until the fowl is cooked through.

  7. Remove the herbs.

  8. Thicken the sauce with cream without boiling.

  9. Finish with lemon juice.

  10. Pour the sauce over the fowl.

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 + sorreltop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together234 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + sorreltop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Clove + sorreltop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the main protein, which cooks slowly in the liquid to become tender.
Flour
Thickens the sauce and helps the fowl brown when shaken in butter.
Butter
Carries flavour and helps the flour and fowl brown in the pan.
Cream
Enriches the sauce and gives it a smooth, rounded texture when stirred in off the boil.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and savoury depth to the sauce as they stew.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with cream without boiling. Cream can curdle or separate when it boils, especially in an acidic sauce. Adding it off the heat and keeping the sauce below a boil keeps it smooth. Lemon juice is added after the cream for the same reason.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, butter, flour, ham, clove, sorrel, mushroom):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, butter, flour, ham, clove, sorrel, mushroom. 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.

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