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Potted Chicken

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

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.

Make the chicken

  1. Place the chickens in a kettle with 2 pounds of salt, onions, parsley, cloves, mace, and bay leaves. Cover with cold water and bring to a boil.

  2. Simmer until tender, then remove from the kettle and discard skin and bones.

  3. Grind the chicken to a fine paste and mix in the remaining salt and pepper.

Can and finish

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

  2. Use the cooking liquid for chicken soup or concentrate it to half its volume, then can it.

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 paste, giving the finished potted meat its body and texture.
Salt pork
Adds fat and richness, keeping the finished mixture moist and well flavoured.
Onions
Contribute aromatic sweetness and flavour to the cooking liquid and the chicken.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the chicken and helps draw out flavour during cooking.
Ground white pepper
Adds a mild, sharp heat that seasons the finished paste.

The step that matters

Grinding the chicken to a fine paste. A smooth, fine texture depends on grinding cooked, boneless meat well; leftover bits of bone or skin would leave the paste coarse and unpleasant.

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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