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Roast Chickens

Roast Chickens stuffed with bread crumbs, butter, pepper, salt, and onion, baked until cooked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Roast Chickens

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Pick and draw the chickens, then wash them in two or three waters, adding a little baking soda to the last wash.

  2. Prepare a stuffing by mixing bread crumbs, butter, pepper, salt, and onion.

  3. Fill the chickens with the stuffing and sew them up.

Roast

  1. Roast the chickens in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for an hour or more, depending on their size.

  2. Baste often with a mixture of butter and water, then with their own gravy.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Young tender chickens
Provide the main protein, which cooks through to tender meat in the oven.
Bread crumbs
Form the bulk of the stuffing, absorbing juices and keeping the filling moist.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the skin brown while basting.
Onion
Adds aromatic flavour to the stuffing as it cooks inside the bird.

The step that matters

Basting during roasting. Regular basting keeps the surface moist and helps the skin brown evenly, so the outside does not dry out before the inside is cooked through.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, bread, butter, 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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