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Braised Chicken

Braised Chicken is a savory dish of whole chickens cooked slowly with bacon, vegetables, and seasonings, finished with a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and summer savory share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Braised Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. In an iron frying pan, cook the bacon slowly until much of the fat has rendered.

  2. Rub the chickens inside with 1 teaspoon of salt and ½ teaspoon of summer savory, then truss them.

  3. Place the chickens in the hot bacon fat, turning often until they are a rich brown.

Braise and serve

  1. Transfer the chickens to an iron kettle with the sliced vegetables, summer savory, and water.

  2. Cover closely and cook slowly until the chickens are tender.

  3. Place the chickens on a platter, topping them with strips of bacon.

  4. Skim the fat from the gravy and thicken it with 2 tablespoons of flour mixed with 2 tablespoons of water.

  5. Strain the gravy if desired.

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. Turnip + summer savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together42 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + summer savorytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together106 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Chickens
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through slow, covered braising.
Bacon
Its rendered fat browns the chickens, and its strips add savory flavor at serving.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy when mixed with water and heated.
Onions
Sliced onions add sweetness and aroma to the braising liquid as they soften.

The step that matters

Browning the chickens in bacon fat. Turning them often in hot fat develops a rich brown crust through the Maillard reaction, which adds deep flavor. Uneven or pale browning leaves the final dish tasting flat.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, celery, turnip, summer savory, pepper, flour):

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, celery, turnip, summer savory, pepper, 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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