Name: Chicken-essence
Ingredients: 1 small whole chicken or ½ large chicken; 1½ pints cold water; 3 whole allspice; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Chicken and allspice work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 410 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Chicken-essence

Ingredients

1 small whole chicken or ½ large chicken
1½ pints cold water
3 whole allspice
coarse sea salt to taste

Directions

Prepare

Mangle the chicken to crush the bones.
Pour 1½ pints of cold water over the chicken.
Add 3 whole allspice.

Cook

Place over heat and bring to a boil.
Once boiling, simmer for 25 minutes.
Season with a little coarse sea salt before serving.

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.

Chicken + allspicetop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together410 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken: Provides the flavour and gelatin-rich bones that give the broth body as they simmer.
Cold water: Acts as the cooking liquid that slowly extracts flavour and collagen from the chicken.
Allspice: Adds a warm, aromatic spice note to the broth.

“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.