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Potted Chicken, and Tongue or Ham

A preserved chicken dish made by boiling, pounding, and seasoning the meat with tongue or ham, then steaming in pots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Potted Chicken, and Tongue or Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Roast the chicken and remove all the meat, discarding the sinews and skin.

  2. Chop and pound the chicken meat thoroughly with the tongue or ham.

  3. Boil the chicken bones down to a glaze.

Make the paste

  1. Moisten the pounded meat with the glaze and season with salt, cayenne pepper, nutmeg, and butter.

  2. Pound the mixture in a mortar to form a paste.

Pot and steam

  1. Place the mixture into pots with boiling water at the bottom.

  2. Steam the pots for 30 minutes, then let them cool.

Finish

  1. Press the meat down again, wipe dry, and cover with hot butter.

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 + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Chicken + hamtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,497 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Ham + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main meat and, through its bones, the glaze that moistens the paste.
Tongue or ham
Adds savoury, cured meat flavour and body to the pounded paste.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that keeps the paste moist and smooth.
Chicken bones glaze
Adds concentrated gelatin and flavour that binds and moistens the pounded meat.

The step that matters

Pounding the meat to a paste. Thorough pounding breaks the meat fibres into a fine, even texture. Under-pounded meat stays coarse and crumbly once potted and chilled.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, ham, pepper, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, ham, pepper, butter. 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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