Name: Prairie-chicken or Grouse
Ingredients: 1 prairie chicken or grouse; Butter; Coarse sea salt; Pepper; Currant jelly; Fried mush or hot buttered toast (for serving); Garnish leaves or watercress

Why it works: Pepper and watercress work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 983 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Prairie-chicken or Grouse

Ingredients

Directions

Split the chicken open at the back and rub with butter.
Fillet the chicken or cut out the breast; cut the remainder into joints and parboil.
Broil the parboiled pieces and the breasts after rubbing butter over them.
Sprinkle with pepper and coarse sea salt, then place a small lump of butter on top of each piece.
Put in the oven for a few moments to soak the butter.
Serve with currant jelly; for breakfast, serve on fried mush, or for dinner, on hot buttered toast.
Garnish with leaves or watercress.

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.

Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together983 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,902 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together19,958 recipes

Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).
Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,856 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).
Chicken + watercresstop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together248 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

Swap the currant

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

Lemonfits better
Limefits better
Avocadofits better
Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, pepper, watercress. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.