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Boiled Fowl with Macaroni

A boiled fowl stuffed with macaroni, butter, and seasonings, served with egg or béchamel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Fowl with Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the macaroni

  1. Break macaroni into 2-inch pieces and add to boiling water.

  2. Add salt and pepper, then boil for 12 minutes.

  3. Drain the macaroni and season with butter and salt.

Stuff and boil the fowls

  1. Stuff the cleaned fowls with the macaroni.

  2. Truss the fowls and wrap in a floured cloth.

  3. Plunge into boiling water to cover and boil for 15 minutes.

  4. Reduce heat to simmer for 1.5 to 2.5 hours, depending on the age of the birds.

Serve

  1. Serve with egg or béchamel sauce, and plain boiled macaroni.

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. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni
Absorbs flavour from the cooking water and forms a starchy, filling stuffing inside the birds.
Fowls
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the cooked macaroni, improving its flavour and mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Reduce heat to a simmer. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil lets the fowls cook through and become tender without toughening the meat or breaking the wrapped birds apart.

“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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