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Pressed Chicken

A dish of ground chicken and sweetbreads mixed with a cream and flour sauce, set in aspic jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Pressed Chicken

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Boil the chicken and sweetbreads until tender.

  2. Let them cool, then grind through a meat grinder.

Make the cream sauce

  1. Boil the onion in the cream and season with parsley, salt, and pepper.

  2. Thicken the cream mixture with a little flour rubbed in the butter.

  3. Once it begins to thicken, strain and mix with the ground chicken and sweetbreads.

Mould

  1. Mould the mixture with aspic jelly.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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 meat base, giving the pressed mixture its body and savoury flavour.
Sweetbreads
Add a soft, tender texture and richness to the ground meat mixture.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, and thickens with flour to bind the mixture.
Flour
Thickens the cream mixture so it can bind the ground meat together.
Aspic jelly
Sets when cooled, holding the mixture together in its moulded shape.

The step that matters

Thicken the cream mixture gently. Flour thickens cream only as it heats and starch swells. If the mixture is too thick or lumpy when combined with the meat, it can bind unevenly and set heavy. Stop once it just begins to thicken, as the record directs.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Turmericfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, cream, onion, pepper, butter, flour. 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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