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Boiled Fowl with Oyster Sauce

A boiled fowl served with a sauce made from oysters, butter, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,062 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Boiled Fowl with Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Prepare the fowls without stuffing them.

  2. Place them in boiling water to cover, adding 1 tablespoon of salt for each quart of water.

  3. Skim the water until clear and boil slowly until tender, about 15 minutes per pound.

Make the oyster sauce

  1. While the fowls are cooking, prepare the oyster sauce.

  2. Blanch the oysters in their own liquor, then drain and wash them in cold water.

  3. In a saucepan, mix the butter and flour over heat until smooth.

  4. Strain in enough oyster liquor and chicken broth to create a sauce as thick as melted butter.

  5. Season the sauce with salt, white pepper, and nutmeg, then add the oysters.

Serve

  1. Serve the fowls on a dish topped with the oyster sauce and sprinkle with chopped 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. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, 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

Fowls
Provide the main cooked meat, which becomes tender through slow simmering in water.
Oysters
Add briny, savoury flavour and tender texture to the sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and richness, and helps form the base of the roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter into a smooth roux.

The step that matters

Skim the water until clear and boil slowly. Gentle simmering keeps the meat tender and juicy, while a hard boil toughens proteins and clouds the broth with impurities that skimming removes.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, oyster, butter, flour, sauce, nutmeg):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, oyster, butter, flour, sauce, nutmeg. 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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