Skip to main content
Preserve

Potted Chicken, Partridge, or Pheasant

A dish of minced roasted bird mixed with butter and seasoned with salt, mace, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chicken and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,902 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Potted Chicken, Partridge, or Pheasant

Ingredients

Directions

Roast and prepare the meat

  1. Roast the bird until thoroughly cooked, ensuring no gravy remains.

  2. Remove the flesh from the breast, wings, and meat, discarding the bones and skin.

Make the potted meat

  1. Mince the meat and pound it smoothly with ⅓ to ½ cup of fresh butter, adjusting the amount based on the meat's consistency.

  2. Season with salt, mace, and cayenne pepper, adding small amounts until the flavor is strong.

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

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

  2. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Forms the main body of the spread, giving it its meaty texture once pounded smooth.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the pounded meat become smooth and spreadable.

The step that matters

Pounding the meat with butter. Butter must be worked into the minced meat gradually so the mixture becomes smooth and spreadable rather than greasy or crumbly. Adjusting the amount to the meat's consistency keeps the texture even.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, 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.

You might also like

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes