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Boiled Chickens and Tongue

A dish of boiled chickens served with a boiled tongue, finished with butter and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,314 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boiled Chickens and Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the meats

  1. Tie the chickens in netting and cook in boiling water with a little salt for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  2. Soak the tongue overnight, then wash it and boil for 18 minutes per pound.

  3. Trim and skin the tongue.

Serve

  1. Place the tongue in the center of a dish with a chicken on each side.

  2. Pour drawn butter made from the reserved boiling liquid mixed with minced parsley over the chickens.

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 + parsleytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,314 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 cooks through in simmering water and stays moist.
Tongue
Provides the rich, firm-textured meat that is the centerpiece of the dish.
Reserved boiling liquid
Flavors the drawn butter, carrying savoury taste from the cooking water to the chicken.

The step that matters

Boiling the tongue. Tongue is a dense, tough muscle that needs a long, gentle simmer to become tender. Boiling it too hard can toughen the outer meat and make it stringy, so keep the water at a steady simmer and time it by weight.

“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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