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Pressed Chicken with Egg

A pressed chicken dish with hard boiled eggs, seasoned with salt, paprika, lemon juice, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Pressed Chicken with Egg

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Simmer the fowl and onion until the meat falls from the bones, adding salt halfway through.

  2. Remove the skin and cut the meat into dice.

Make the broth

  1. Skim the broth, then add salt, paprika, and lemon juice; boil until reduced to 2½ cups.

  2. Soak the gelatine in cold water, then add it to the broth.

Set in moulds

  1. Mix well with the chicken and pour into moulds with slices of hard boiled eggs at the bottom.

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. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  2. Onion + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Onion + eggtop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,333 recipes

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

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Fowl
Provides the meat that is cut into dice and set in the jelly.
Gelatine
Sets the broth so the chicken and eggs hold their shape when turned out.
Hard boiled eggs
Sliced and placed at the bottom of the moulds, forming a visible layer when unmoulded.

The step that matters

Soak the gelatine in cold water, then add it to the broth. Gelatine must be softened in cold water first so it dissolves evenly into the hot broth. Added dry or into a boiling liquid, it can clump and set unevenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, egg):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, egg. 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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