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Jellied Chicken

A dish of cooked chicken set in gelatin made from the cooking broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Jellied Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Cook the chickens in a small quantity of water until the meat easily separates from the bones.

  2. Season the broth with salt and pepper.

  3. Once cool enough to handle, remove the bones and skin from the chickens.

Set the jelly

  1. Place the meat, including gizzards, livers, and hearts, into a deep pan or mold until nearly full.

  2. To the remaining broth, add the gelatine dissolved in a little warm water and boil until reduced to just under 1 quart.

  3. Pour the gelatine mixture over the chicken in the mold and let it cool.

  4. Once set, cut with a very sharp knife and serve.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. 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 meat and the broth that becomes the jelly.
Gelatine
Sets the reduced broth into a firm jelly that holds the meat together when cut.

The step that matters

Reducing the broth with gelatine. Boiling the broth concentrates its flavour and natural gelatin, while the added gelatine supplies the setting power. Reducing too little leaves the jelly soft and weak; boiling the gelatine too hard can weaken its setting ability.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Mangofits less well
  4. Grapefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper. 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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