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Pressed Chicken

A dish of boiled chicken pressed into a mold, served cold with parsley garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Pressed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Draw, singe, and wipe the chicken well.

  2. Place the chicken in a kettle and cover with cold water.

  3. Simmer gently over moderate heat until the meat falls off the bones.

Make the stock and meat

  1. Remove the meat and cut it into small pieces.

  2. Return the bones and skin to the kettle and boil until the liquid reduces to 1½ pints.

  3. Strain the liquid and season with salt and pepper.

  4. Mix the seasoned liquid with the chicken pieces.

Press and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a square mold and place a light weight on top.

  2. Let it stand in a cool place overnight.

  3. Once hard and cold, turn out and garnish with parsley.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  3. Chicken + parsleytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,314 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the meat that is set into the pressed mass and the bones that build the stock.
Cold water
Extracts flavour and gelatin from the bones and skin as it simmers into stock.

The step that matters

Simmer gently over moderate heat until the meat falls off the bones. Boiling hard toughens and dries the meat fibres, while gentle simmering keeps them tender and lets collagen slowly convert to gelatin, which helps the stock set when chilled.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Rosemaryfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper. 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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