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Pressed Chicken

Pressed chicken is a chilled dish made by cooking a whole chicken, removing the meat, and setting it in gelatin with lemon or eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Pressed Chicken

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken in as little water as possible until fully cooked.

  2. Remove the meat from the bones and chop it finely, as you would for a salad.

Assemble the mold

  1. Wet a mold or dish with cold water.

  2. Layer thin slices of lemon or hard boiled eggs in the bottom of the mold.

  3. Add the chopped chicken without pressing it down.

  4. Dissolve half a box of gelatine in 1 cup of the chicken boiling water and pour it over the chicken.

Set and serve

  1. Let it cool, then turn it out to serve whole or sliced.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Chicken + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,991 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Chicken
Forms the main body of the dish, providing the meat and savory flavor.
Gelatine
Sets the cooking liquid into a firm jelly that holds the chicken together when turned out.
Hard boiled eggs
Add firm texture and a mild, rich flavor contrast to the chopped chicken.
Lemon
Adds acidity and a bright, fresh aroma that cuts through the rich chicken and jelly.

The step that matters

Add the chicken without pressing it down. Pressing the chopped chicken compacts it and squeezes out texture, while loose layering lets the gelatine liquid fill the gaps so the set mold holds together and slices cleanly.

“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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