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Pressed Chicken

A dish of boiled chicken meat layered and pressed, seasoned with pepper and salt, and served with reduced gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,958 recipes. Both carry piperonal, which smells bitter, coconut. The science ↓

Pressed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Boil the chickens in as little water as possible until very tender, adding a little salt while cooking.

  2. Remove all the meat from the bones, separating the light and dark meat.

Layer and press

  1. In an earthen dish, layer the dark meat and then the light meat alternately until all is used.

  2. Season each layer with pepper and salt.

  3. Boil the gravy down to 1 cup and pour it over the chicken.

  4. Fit a board or cover over the dish.

  5. Press it until cold.

  6. Turn it out onto a platter.

  7. Cut at the table, or slice before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

What each ingredient does

Chickens
Provide the meat that is pressed into a firm, sliceable loaf.

The step that matters

Press it until cold. Pressing while the meat cools squeezes out excess liquid and lets the pieces bind into a firm mass that holds together when sliced.

“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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