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Pressed Chicken

Boiled chicken meat pressed into a mold with its cooking liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,958 recipes. Both carry piperonal, which smells bitter, coconut. The science ↓

Pressed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken in a small amount of water with a little coarse sea salt until fully cooked.

  2. Remove all meat from the bones, discarding the skin, and keep the light and dark meat separate.

  3. Chop the meat coarsely and season with salt and black pepper to taste.

Press and set

  1. In a mold, layer the dark meat first, then the white meat.

  2. Pour in the reserved cooking liquid, place a heavy weight on top, and refrigerate to cool and harden.

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main body of the pressed dish, with meat that holds together once cooled.
Cooking liquid (in the method)
Moistens the meat and, as it cools, helps bind the pieces into a firm set.

The step that matters

Pressing under a heavy weight while chilling. Pressing and cooling together squeeze out excess liquid and let the gelatin from the cooking liquid set, so the pieces bind into slices instead of crumbling. Too little weight or too short a chill leaves the loaf loose.

“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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