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Barbecued Chicken

Barbecued Chicken is a roasted chicken cooked with butter, water, salt, pepper, and flour, served with pan gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Barbecued Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Split the chicken down the back and break the joints to lay it open.

Brown and baste

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and add the water.

  2. Season the chicken with salt and pepper.

  3. Brown the chicken well.

  4. Dredge it with flour.

  5. Baste it every 15 minutes with drippings from the pan until tender.

Serve

  1. Pour the gravy from the pan over the chicken and serve.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

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

  3. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Whole chicken
Main protein, split and opened so it lies flat for even browning.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor and helps the chicken brown in the pan.
Flour
Coats the chicken, aiding browning and thickening the pan drippings into gravy.

The step that matters

Brown the chicken well. Browning develops flavor and color through Maillard reactions, and the browned bits left in the pan form the drippings that make the gravy. Pale chicken gives a flat, weak-tasting result.

“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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