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Pressed Chicken

Pressed chicken is a dish made by boiling chicken, removing skin, mixing meat, seasoning, reducing liquid, packing into a mold, and cooling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Pressed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Boil the fowl in as little salted water as possible until the bones slip out.

  2. Remove the skin and pick off the meat into small pieces.

  3. Mix the light and dark meat together and season with salt, pepper, celery salt, parsley, and lemon juice if desired.

  4. Boil down the cooking liquid to 1 cup.

Press and chill

  1. Pack the meat firmly in a mold and pour enough liquid over to moisten it.

  2. Set aside to cool with a weight on top, preferably overnight.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, carefully turn it out onto a board and slice with a thin sharp knife.

  2. Garnish with parsley, radishes, or beets.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the meat that is pressed into a firm, sliceable loaf.
Cooking liquid (in the method)
Moistens the packed meat and, reduced, adds concentrated savory flavor.

The step that matters

Pack the meat firmly and chill under a weight. Firm packing removes air gaps so the meat binds into a loaf that holds together when sliced. Cooling under weight lets the concentrated gelatin in the liquid set the pieces together.

“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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