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Grilled Chicken. Tartare Sauce.

Grilled chicken served with tartare sauce, pickles, chutney, and watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 108 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Grilled Chicken. Tartare Sauce.

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Sear the chicken and cut it partly down the back, removing all bones except at the bottom of the back.

  2. Draw out the sinews from the thighs, trim the feet and legs, scald them, and peel off the outer skin.

  3. Place the trimmed legs in the thighs and skewer the fowl for cooking.

Grill and serve

  1. Butter a pan and place the chicken in it, inserting the peeled potato into the breast.

  2. Brush the chicken with warm butter and grill for about 20 minutes, basting occasionally.

  3. Brush the chicken with beaten egg and dip it in browned breadcrumbs.

  4. Add small pieces of butter on top and grill for an additional 5 to 10 minutes.

  5. Remove the potato, garnish with pickles, chutney, and watercress, and serve with Tartare sauce.

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. Watercress + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together108 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + watercresstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Chicken + potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,756 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-decenal (green, must).

  5. Potato + tarragontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together279 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Forms the main body of the dish and provides the meat that cooks through during grilling.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture while basting, and helps the surface brown during grilling.
Egg
Binds the breadcrumb coating so it adheres to the chicken surface.
Breadcrumbs
Forms a crisp, golden coating that browns under the grill.

The step that matters

Basting and timing the grill. Basting with warm butter keeps the surface moist and encourages even browning, while grilling too long or too hot can dry out the meat before the thick parts are cooked through.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, egg, watercress, tarragon, vinegar. 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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