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Hashed Fowl

A hash made from cold roasted fowl, ham, and stock, thickened with butter and flour and seasoned with shallots, mace, pepper, salt, sugar, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Hashed Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Cut the cold roasted fowl into pieces as for a fricassee.

  2. Put the trimmings into a saucepan with shallots, lemon peel, mace, ham, and stock.

  3. Simmer for 30 minutes.

  4. Strain the mixture.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add enough flour to dry it up while stirring continuously.

  3. Add the strained gravy.

  4. Let it boil for 1 minute.

  5. Add the fowl, pepper, salt, and a dust of sugar.

  6. Squeeze in a little lemon juice before serving.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Cold roasted fowl
Forms the main body of the dish, gently reheated in the sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries the flour so it cooks smoothly.
Flour
Thickens the gravy into a smooth, lightly coating sauce when stirred with butter.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the gravy, adding savoury depth.
Lean ham
Adds savoury, salty depth to the gravy as it simmers.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the butter. Flour must be stirred constantly so it cooks evenly with the butter; otherwise lumps form and the sauce tastes raw and floury instead of smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, lemon, ham, butter, flour, pepper, sugar):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, lemon, ham, butter, flour, pepper, sugar. 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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