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Chicken Saute

A dish of young chickens cooked slowly in rendered pork fat after being coated in milk, salt, pepper, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Chicken Saute

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Remove pin feathers from the chickens.

  2. Clean the chickens.

  3. Singe the chickens.

  4. Disjoint the chickens.

  5. Dip the chickens quickly into cold milk and drain.

  6. Sprinkle the chickens with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  7. Dredge the chickens thickly with flour.

Render the pork fat

  1. Cut the fat salt pork into ¼ inch cubes.

  2. Fry the pork cubes in a frying pan until rendered.

  3. Remove the pork scraps.

Cook the chicken

  1. Cook the chicken slowly in the pork fat until well browned and tender.

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

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

  2. Milk + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + porktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Young chickens
Provide the tender meat that is cooked in the sauté.
Flour
Forms a dredging coat that browns during cooking and helps create a crisp crust.
Fat salt pork
Renders into fat that cooks the chicken and adds savory flavour and browning.
Cold milk
Brief dip that helps the seasoning and flour adhere to the chicken.

The step that matters

Cook the chicken slowly in the pork fat. Cooking slowly lets heat reach the thick pieces through before the flour coating over-browns and burns. Gentle heat also keeps the meat tender while the coating turns golden.

“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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