Name: Frying with Salt Pork
Ingredients: 1 prairie chicken; slices of fried salt pork

Why it works: Chicken and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,417 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Frying with Salt Pork

Ingredients

1 prairie chicken
slices of fried salt pork

Directions

Cook

Cook the prairie chicken in a skillet.
Fry slices of salt pork until crispy.

Serve

Serve a slice of pork with each piece of chicken.

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.

Chicken + porktop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,417 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Prairie chicken: Provides the main protein, which browns and cooks through in the skillet.
Salt pork: Adds salty, savory fat that crisps when fried and flavors the chicken.

“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.