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Pressed Chicken

A dish of boiled chicken meat pressed into a compact form, seasoned with salt, pepper, and allspice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,395 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pressed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fowls

  1. Place the cut-up fowls in a kettle with a light cover to retain steam.

  2. Add enough water to cover the fowls and season with salt and pepper.

  3. Cook until the meat easily falls from the bones.

Press and set

  1. Chop the meat finely and add a little allspice.

  2. Put the chopped meat in a dish and press it down.

  3. Pour the remaining stock over the pressed meat.

  4. Set in a cool place until it jellies.

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 + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowls
Provide the meat that is cooked, chopped and pressed into the dish.
Stock from cooking the fowls
Carries gelatin from the bones, so the pressed meat sets into a jelly as it cools.

The step that matters

Cooking the fowls gently until the meat easily falls from the bones. Slow cooking under a light cover keeps the meat moist and draws gelatin from the bones into the stock. That gelatin is what makes the pressed chicken set firm when chilled.

“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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