Skip to main content
Main

Roast Chicken

A whole chicken roasted with butter or bacon, carrots, onions, herbs, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Roast Chicken

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cover the chicken breast with butter or dripping, or tie a piece of fat bacon over it.

Roast

  1. Place the chicken in a paper bag and set it on a grid in a hot oven (400°F / 200°C).

  2. Roast a small spring chicken for 25 minutes, a large fowl for 35 minutes, or stuffed poultry for 45-50 minutes in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C).

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Chicken
Forms the main protein, which firms and turns opaque as it cooks through.
Butter or dripping
Adds fat that carries heat over the breast and helps it brown and stay moist.
Fat bacon
Lays over the breast as a fat layer that bastes the meat and keeps it juicy.

The step that matters

Matching the time to the size of the bird. Heat must travel from the skin to the thickest part of the meat, so a larger bird or stuffed poultry needs longer in the oven. Cooking by size rather than by appearance helps the centre finish cooking evenly with the outside.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Celerythe original
  4. Marjoramfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, carrot, onion, clove, 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.

More roast chicken recipes

Stuffed 5Country 3French 3 See all 197 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes