Name: Broiled Fowl, and Mushroom Saice
Ingredients: 1 large fowl, cut into quarters; ¼ cup butter; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; 1 cup mushrooms; 1 slice lean ham; ½ cup coulis; 1 lemon; 1 teaspoon sugar

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Broiled Fowl, and Mushroom Saice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Preheat your grill.

Cook the fowl

Tie the fowl quarters onto a spit and roast until three-quarters done, basting with butter.
Remove the fowl and finish cooking on a grill, seasoning with pepper and salt.

Make the mushroom sauce

In a saucepan, combine mushrooms, butter, pepper, salt, and ham; cook gently on low heat for 30 minutes.
Add coulis, squeeze in lemon juice, and sprinkle with sugar to the mushrooms.

Serve

Serve the fowl on a dish and top with the mushroom mixture.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,633 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Mushroom + hamtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,486 recipes

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

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 is cooked through by roasting and then grilling.
Mushrooms: Form the body of the sauce and add earthy, savoury flavour as they soften.
Butter: Adds richness and moisture while basting the fowl and cooking the mushrooms.
Lemon: Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and mushroom sauce.
Sugar: Adds a little sweetness to balance the acidity of the lemon and coulis.

The step that matters

Finish cooking the fowl on the grill. Removing the fowl before it is fully cooked and finishing it on the grill lets the heat reach the centre without drying the outside. Check that the meat is cooked through before serving.

“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.

Lemon Sauce236 recipes

Mushroom Soup60 recipes

Tomato Soup526 recipes

Brown Bread461 recipes

Like knowing why a recipe works?

The free Flavor Lab newsletter: one surprising pairing a week and the molecular reason it works, in 60 seconds. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.

Prefer an account? Create a free account to save pairings and unlock the full chemistry.

Broiled Fowl, and Mushroom Saice