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Braised Chicken

Braised chicken roasted with vegetables and salt pork, served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Braised Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Prepare the chicken for roasting.

  2. Dredge the chicken with flour, salt, and pepper.

  3. Brown the chicken all over in hot butter or chicken fat.

Roast

  1. Place the chicken in a roasting pan on a bed of sliced onion, carrot, turnip, and celery.

  2. Cover the chicken with 4 slices of salt pork.

  3. Add 2 cups of water and cover the pan closely with another pan.

  4. Roast for 3 hours, basting often and replenishing the water to keep about 2 cups in the pan.

Serve

  1. Remove the chicken to a platter and garnish with vegetables.

  2. Make gravy from the liquid in the pan.

  3. Season the gravy to taste.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Old chicken
Provides the main body of meat, which becomes tender through long, slow moist cooking.
Flour
Coats the chicken so it browns well and helps thicken the pan liquid into gravy.
Butter or chicken fat
Conducts heat for browning the skin and adds rich flavour to the chicken.
Salt pork
Adds savoury fat and salty flavour that seasons the chicken and the braising liquid.
Onion
Forms a bed of aromatics that flavours the braising liquid and later the gravy.

The step that matters

Keep the water level at about 2 cups during the 3-hour roast. Water in the covered pan creates steam and moist heat for braising. If the liquid evaporates, the chicken can dry out and the pan drippings may scorch instead of forming a usable gravy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, flour, pepper, butter, carrot, turnip, celery):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, flour, pepper, butter, carrot, turnip, celery. 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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