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Minced Fowls on Toast

A dish of minced fowl and hard‑boiled eggs in a cream‑butter gravy served over hot toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Minced Fowls on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the meat from the bones of the fowls and clean it from the skin. Keep it covered until ready to use.

  2. Boil the bones and skin with ¾ cup of water until reduced by half. Strain the gravy and let it cool.

Make the sauce

  1. Skim off the fat and put the gravy into a clean saucepan with ½ cup of cream, 3 tablespoons of butter, and 1 tablespoon of flour. Stir until it boils.

  2. Add the minced fowl and chopped hard-boiled eggs. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Heat the mixture over the fire until ready to serve.

Serve

  1. Dish the mixture over hot toast and serve.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, adding richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it heats, giving the sauce body and structure.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the sauce.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and a soft, creamy texture to the minced mixture.

The step that matters

Stir the sauce until it boils. Flour needs to reach a boil in the liquid to fully thicken and lose its raw taste. Stopping early leaves the sauce thin or pasty, so keep stirring to prevent lumps and scorching on the base of the pan.

“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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