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A Nice Way to Dress a Fowl for a Small Dish

A small fowl stuffed with a forcemeat of veal, ham, bacon, eggs, herbs, and spices, then stewed and finished with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,039 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

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

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Bone, singe, and wash the fowl.

Make and stuff the forcemeat

  1. Make a forcemeat by mixing veal, ham, bacon, egg yolks, herbs, beef suet, lemon peel, anchovy, salt, pepper, and cayenne in a mortar.

  2. Add breadcrumbs and the yolks and whites of the eggs to the forcemeat and mix well.

  3. Stuff the forcemeat inside the fowl and tie the neck and rump closed.

Stew and finish

  1. Stew the fowl in white gravy until tender.

  2. Once cooked, add cream, butter, and flour; bring to a boil.

  3. Serve with a squeeze of lemon.

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. Lemon + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,039 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Beef + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Veal + beeftop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  4. Egg + anchovytop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Veal + anchovytop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together456 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the forcemeat together and help it hold its shape while cooking.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb moisture and give the forcemeat body and a lighter texture.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the forcemeat moist and rich as it cooks.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the finished gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the fowl.

The step that matters

Bringing the gravy to a boil after adding cream. Cream and flour can separate or curdle if boiled too hard or too long, so keep the heat controlled once the dairy goes in and the gravy should be stirred to stay smooth and thickened.

“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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