Name: To Cook Chicken for Travelling Lunch
Ingredients: 1 young fowl; coarse sea salt; black pepper; flour; water

Why it works: Pepper and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,459 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Cook Chicken for Travelling Lunch

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Clean the fowl.
Split the fowl down the back and wipe it dry.
Season the fowl with coarse sea salt and black pepper, then sprinkle with flour.

Bake and serve

Add water to the pan and bake at 400°F (200°C) for one hour, basting frequently.
Cut the cooked chicken into small pieces for lunch.

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.

Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together50,459 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Young fowl: Provides the meat that is cooked and cut into pieces for the lunch.
Flour: Sprinkled over the seasoned fowl, it helps the skin brown during baking.

“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.