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Steamed Chicken

Steamed chicken stuffed with oysters, served with celery sauce, baked sweet potatoes, and boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Steamed Chicken

Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Steamed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the chicken and wipe it very dry.

  2. Rub coarse sea salt, black pepper, and plenty of butter inside the cavity.

  3. Fill the cavity with large oysters seasoned with salt, pepper, and celery salt.

  4. Tie the legs and wings close to the body and place the chicken in a small dish.

Steam and make the sauce

  1. Set the dish in a steamer and cook for 4 hours.

  2. Meanwhile, cook the chopped celery until soft enough to pass through a puree sieve.

  3. Make a white sauce using the liquor from the oysters and add the pureed celery.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the chicken on a platter.

  2. Garnish with curly parsley and serve with baked sweet potatoes and boiled rice.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + sweet potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together180 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Celery + sweet potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together162 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Whole chicken
Provides the main body of the dish, cooked gently by steam until tender.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture inside the cavity as the chicken cooks.
Large oysters
Flavor the chicken from within, and their liquor gives the white sauce its savory taste.
Chopped celery
Softened and pureed, it thickens and flavors the white sauce with body and aroma.

The step that matters

Steaming the chicken for 4 hours. Steam holds the temperature near boiling, so the chicken cooks slowly and evenly. Too little water or heat in the steamer can leave the bird underdone or dry it out, so keep the steamer supplied and check the bird is cooked through.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, butter, oyster, celery, sauce, parsley):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, butter, oyster, celery, sauce, parsley. 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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