Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓
Cheap Gravy for a Roast Fowl
Ingredients
Directions
Cut the neck of the fowl into small pieces and boil it in ½ pint of water with a little salt and pepper for at least 1 hour.
When the fowl is ready, drain the fat from the dripping pan and strain the liquid from the neck into it.
Mix the strained liquid smoothly with the gravy, heat it, and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper or cayenne if needed.
Serve the gravy extremely hot.
Baste the fowl with good butter and flour it when first placed in the oven.
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.
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Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together85,593 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
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