Name: Fricassee De Poulets
Ingredients: 2 whole fowls; 2 pints water; 1 onion, sliced; 4 sprigs parsley; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Onion and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,843 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Fricassee De Poulets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowls

Prepare the fowls and truss them.
Cut off the nails and remove the craw.
Cut the fowls into pieces: legs, drumsticks, and wings.
Break the thigh bones, remove half of the bone, cut the back in two, and pare the ends.

Cook

Put the fowl pieces in a stewpan with water, onion, parsley, and salt.
Simmer until cooked through.

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.

Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fowls: Provide the main meat, which becomes tender and flavourful as it simmers.
Water: Forms the cooking liquid that gently cooks the pieces and carries flavour.
Onion: Adds aromatic sweetness and savoury depth to the simmering liquid.

“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.