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Preserve

Potted Chicken

Potted Chicken is a preserved chicken product made by cooking chicken with salt pork, spices, and canning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Potted Chicken

Why it works: Chicken and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,417 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Potted Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook and skin the salt pork as you would for beef.

  2. Draw and clean the chickens.

Cook the chicken

  1. Place the chickens in a kettle with 2 pounds of salt, onions, parsley, cloves, mace, and bay leaves.

  2. Cover with cold water and bring to a boil.

  3. Simmer until tender, then remove from the kettle and take off the skin and bones.

Make the paste and pack

  1. Grind the chicken to a fine paste.

  2. Mix the remaining salt and ground white pepper into the paste.

  3. Pack the mixture into cans, cap them, tip, and process as you would beef.

  4. Use the cooking liquid for chicken soup or concentrate it to half its volume, then pack in one-gallon cans, cap, tip, and process for 55 minutes at 250°F (120°C).

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Chicken + porktop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,417 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 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

Chicken
Forms the bulk of the dish, giving the paste its body and meaty flavour.
Salt pork
Adds fat and richness, contributing moisture and savoury flavour to the paste.
Onions
Add aromatic sweetness and flavour to the cooking liquid that the chicken simmers in.
Whole cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavour during simmering.
Mace
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the chicken during simmering.
Ground white pepper
Adds mild, sharp heat that seasons the paste throughout.

The step that matters

Simmer until tender. Simmering must go far enough to fully soften the chicken so it grinds into a smooth paste; undercooked meat stays tough and grainy. Removing skin and bones afterward keeps the paste clean and even in texture.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pork, onion, parsley, clove, mace):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pork, onion, parsley, clove, mace. 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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