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Boiled Fowl

A whole fowl boiled with lemon, butter, and a sauce of butter, flour, milk, and stock.

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 ↓

Boiled Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Remove the legs from the fowl at the first joint and draw the sinews.

  2. Fold the wings over and skewer them with the legs.

  3. Tie the legs together and cover the breast with lemon slices.

  4. Wrap the fowl in buttered paper.

Boil and simmer

  1. Place the wrapped fowl in boiling water.

  2. Boil for 5-6 minutes.

  3. Reduce the heat to a simmer.

  4. Simmer for 1-1½ hours.

  5. Remove the paper.

  6. Drain the fowl.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add flour and mix until smooth.

  3. Gradually add milk and the boiling liquid.

  4. Cook for 3 minutes.

  5. Stir in salt and pepper.

  6. Strain the sauce over the fowl.

  7. Garnish with the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, either rubbed through a sieve or sliced.

Finish and serve

  1. For a cold dish, add dissolved gelatine to the sauce.

  2. Coat the fowl twice with the gelatine sauce.

  3. Serve on a bed of salad.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Fowl
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour, giving it a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth white sauce as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the body of the white sauce, adding creaminess and mild sweetness.
Gelatine
Sets the sauce so it clings to the chilled fowl for a cold dish.

The step that matters

Simmer gently rather than boil. A hard boil toughens the meat's proteins and can break the fowl apart, while a gentle simmer cooks it evenly and keeps it tender and moist.

“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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