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Roast Chickens

A whole chicken roasted with bread crumbs, salt, pepper, butter, and optional salt pork, onions, herbs, and mace, served with a gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,417 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Roast Chickens

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

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

  2. Wash the chicken.

  3. Stuff the chicken with bread crumbs seasoned with salt, pepper, and butter. Fasten the chicken tightly.

Make the gravy

  1. In a stew pan, cook slices of salt pork with a quart of water and a bit of butter.

  2. Add sliced onions and sweet herbs if desired.

  3. Stew until tender.

Serve

  1. Remove the chicken.

  2. Strain the gravy over it.

  3. If the gravy is too thick, add boiling water to adjust the consistency.

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. Chicken + porktop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,417 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  4. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Absorb the butter and seasoning in the stuffing, keeping the filling moist and flavourful.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the stuffing and the gravy.
Salt pork
Releases savoury fat and salt into the water, flavouring the gravy.

The step that matters

Fasten the chicken tightly. A tightly closed cavity keeps the bread crumb stuffing from falling out and holds it in place while the bird cooks, so the stuffing heats through and stays moist.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, bread, pepper, butter, pork, mace):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Onionthe original
  4. Tomatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, bread, pepper, butter, pork, mace. 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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