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Boiled Fowls

A stew of rice, gravy, onion, herbs, stuffed chicken, egg yolks, lemon, and saffron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and saffron match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 538 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Boiled Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Gently stew the rice in the strong gravy until it begins to swell.

  2. Add the onion, sweet herbs, and stuffed chicken to the pot.

  3. Continue to stew until the chicken is thoroughly cooked.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the chicken and stir the egg yolks and lemon juice into the rice.

  2. Serve the chicken on the same dish as the rice, colored yellow with saffron.

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 + saffrontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together538 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Rice + saffrontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together629 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Rice + chickentop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Clove + saffrontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together455 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Onion + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Absorbs the gravy and swells, forming the body of the dish.
Egg yolks
Enrich the rice and thicken it gently as they set with heat.
Strong gravy
Supplies the savory liquid that the rice absorbs and cooks in.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and egg yolks.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg yolks into the rice. Egg yolks thicken when heated, so they should be stirred in off the heat or with the rice no longer boiling hard. Adding them to a vigorously boiling mixture can scramble them into lumps instead of a smooth, creamy binding.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, onion, chicken, egg, lemon, saffron):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, onion, chicken, egg, lemon, saffron. 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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