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Prairie-chicken or Grouse

A roasted prairie chicken or grouse rubbed with butter, seasoned with salt and pepper, served with currant jelly and toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and watercress work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 983 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Prairie-chicken or Grouse

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 the chicken

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Split the chicken open at the back and rub it with butter.

  3. Fillet the chicken or cut out the breast; cut the remainder into joints and parboil.

Cook and serve

  1. Broil the chicken pieces and breasts after rubbing butter over them.

  2. Once broiled, sprinkle with pepper and coarse sea salt, and place a small lump of butter on top of each piece.

  3. Put the chicken in the oven for a few minutes to soak the butter.

  4. Serve with currant jelly.

  5. For breakfast, serve on fried mush; for dinner, serve on hot buttered toast with currant jelly on top.

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. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Chicken + watercresstop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together248 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts over the chicken to add richness and moisture, and helps the skin brown.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and acidity that cut through the richness of the gamey meat.

The step that matters

Parboiling the joints before broiling. Parboiling partly cooks the tougher joints so they become tender; skipping or shortening it can leave them chewy while the breast is already done.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, pepper, watercress. 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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