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Pressed Chicken

A dish of stewed chicken that is pressed into a firm loaf and sliced.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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

Prepare the chicken

  1. Clean the chickens.

  2. Cut up the chickens.

  3. Stew the chickens in enough water to cover them.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper when nearly cooked.

  5. Let them stew until the water is mostly boiled out and the meat falls easily from the bones.

Shred and combine

  1. Remove the bones and gristle.

  2. Chop the meat coarsely.

  3. Skim off the fat from the broth.

  4. Return the meat to the stew pot with the remaining broth.

  5. Heat through.

Press and set

  1. Transfer the mixture to a square bread pan.

  2. Place a platter on top.

  3. Weigh it down with a heavy object.

  4. Allow it to set until firm.

  5. Slice into even pieces.

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

Chickens
Provide the main body of the dish, becoming tender as they stew and then firm when pressed.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture stew until the water is mostly boiled out. If the liquid is not reduced enough, the meat will stay loose and the pressed loaf will not hold its shape when sliced. Stewing until the meat falls from the bones also means the collagen has softened, which gives the set loaf its body.

“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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