Name: Boiled Chickens
Ingredients: 2 whole chickens; Salt to taste; Optional: stuffing (your choice); Optional: pork (for boiling with chickens)

Why it works: Chicken and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,417 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Boiled Chickens

Ingredients

2 whole chickens
Salt to taste
Optional: stuffing (your choice)
Optional: pork (for boiling with chickens)

Directions

Prepare

Dress and clean the chickens thoroughly.
If desired, prepare and stuff the chickens with your choice of stuffing.

Boil and simmer

Place the chickens in a large pot and cover with water.
Add salt to taste and optional pork if using.
Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 1 to 2 hours, depending on the size and age of the chickens.

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 + porktop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,417 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chickens: Provide the main protein that becomes tender as it simmers in the liquid.
Pork: Optional addition that can enrich the flavor of the cooking liquid.

“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.