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Potted Chicken, Grouse, or Other Birds

A potting of a whole or cut bird with onion, salt, pepper, flour, and water, cooked slowly until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,814 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Potted Chicken, Grouse, or Other Birds

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. If the bird is large, cut it into small pieces; otherwise, cook it whole.

  2. Sauté or fry the bird in a pan until lightly browned.

Cook

  1. Combine the bird, onion, salt, pepper, brown flour, and water in a jar.

  2. Cook slowly until very tender: 2 to 2.5 hours if the meat is pre-cooked, or 4 hours if raw.

Serve

  1. Serve the cooked bird with the 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. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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

Bird
Provides the meat that becomes tender during slow cooking and flavours the sauce.
Brown flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce as its starch swells with heat.
Onion
Adds savoury aroma and sweetness to the sauce as it softens during cooking.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until very tender. Connective tissue in the bird breaks down only with long, gentle heat. Cooking too fast or too briefly leaves the meat tough, so the time must match whether the meat was pre-cooked or raw.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, flour. 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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