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Boiled Fowl with Egg Sauce

A boiled fowl served with a sauce made from butter, flour, broth, milk, and egg whites, garnished with lemon and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Boiled Fowl with Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Truss the fowl and rub it with a little lemon juice.

  2. Wrap the fowl in buttered paper or cloth and boil according to its size.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter, then stir in the flour to make a roux.

  2. Gradually add the broth and milk, stirring until smooth.

  3. Separate the egg whites from the yolks and chop the whites.

  4. Add the chopped egg whites, pepper, salt, and lemon juice to the sauce.

Serve

  1. Remove the fowl from the pot, drain, and place it on a serving dish.

  2. Pour the sauce over the fowl and rub the egg yolks through a coarse wire sieve on top.

  3. Optionally, rub the liver of the fowl through the sieve onto the breast.

  4. Garnish the dish with lemon and parsley.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Fowl
Forms the main dish; boiling cooks it through while keeping the meat moist and tender.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and, with flour, forms the roux that thickens it.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by forming a roux with the melted butter.
Broth
Adds savoury flavour to the sauce and loosens it into a pourable consistency.
Milk
Makes the sauce smooth and creamy, softening its flavour.
Eggs
Contribute richness and body to the sauce; the chopped whites add texture and the yolks give a soft, creamy finish.

The step that matters

Stirring the sauce while adding the broth and milk. Adding liquid to a roux gradually while stirring keeps the flour dispersed, so the sauce becomes smooth rather than lumpy as the starch thickens.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, flour, milk, lemon, pepper):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Cardamomfits about as well
  4. Cinnamonfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, flour, milk, lemon, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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