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Boiled Chicken and Macaroni

A dish of boiled chicken served with macaroni cooked in seasoned broth, garnished with parsley and served with drawn butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Boiled Chicken and Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and boil the chicken

  1. Sew each chicken in tarlatan or cheesecloth.

  2. Boil the chickens until tender.

Make the macaroni

  1. Remove 1 cup of the broth, strain, and season it.

  2. Cook the macaroni in the seasoned broth for 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Garnish a platter with the macaroni and parsley, and place the chickens in the center.

  2. Serve with drawn butter.

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 + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Chicken + parsleytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,314 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Chickens
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long cooking in liquid.
Macaroni
Starch that absorbs the seasoned broth and softens into a hearty base.
Chicken broth
Carries salt and savory flavor into the macaroni as it cooks.
Drawn butter
Adds fat and richness to the finished dish at the table.

The step that matters

Boil the chickens until tender. Meat proteins tighten and toughen when cooked too hard or too long, so the chickens should be checked and removed as soon as they are tender.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, butter):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter. 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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