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Roast Chicken

A whole chicken stuffed with force‑meat, bacon, and seasonings, roasted with water and butter, then basted and browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Roast Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the chicken

  1. Wash the chicken thoroughly and wipe it dry inside and out.

  2. Stuff the body and craw with the force-meat, but do not pack it tightly.

  3. Sew up the body and pull the skin over the craw to the neck, fastening it with cotton cord.

  4. Bind the legs and wings close to the body with tape or cotton cord.

  5. If the chicken is not very fat, place a few slices of bacon or pork in the pan and set the chicken on top.

Roast

  1. Pour 1 cup of boiling water over the chicken, cover, and cook at 400°F (200°C) for 15 minutes.

  2. Reduce the heat to 350°F (175°C) and cook for 15 minutes per pound.

  3. Baste every 30 minutes if using a covered roaster, or every 10 minutes in an open pan, pouring at least 10 large spoonfuls of gravy over the chicken each time.

  4. A quarter hour before serving, wash the chicken with butter, season with pepper and salt, and dredge with flour.

  5. Remove the cover and brown the chicken.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Chop the giblets finely.

  2. Stir in a spoonful of browned flour mixed with cold water into the pan gravy.

  3. Boil the gravy.

  4. Season to taste.

  5. Add the giblets to the gravy.

  6. Serve in a boat.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Chicken + porktop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,417 recipes

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

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Meat + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,208 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Chicken
Forms the main body of the dish, and its fat and juices keep the meat moist as it roasts.
Force-meat stuffing
Fills the cavity, adding moisture and flavour to the meat as it cooks.
Bacon or pork fat
Adds fat to the pan, which helps keep the chicken moist and flavours the gravy.
Butter
Basting fat that promotes browning and gives the skin a golden colour.
Flour
Dredged over the skin and browned into the gravy, where it thickens the pan juices.

The step that matters

Remove the cover and brown the chicken. Once the cover comes off, the surface dries and browns through the Maillard reaction. Without that final browning, the skin stays pale and flabby, and the bird can look underdone despite being cooked through.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, meat, pork, butter, pepper, flour, bread):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits about as well
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, meat, pork, butter, pepper, flour, bread. 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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