Name: To Boil Chickens or Turkey
Ingredients: 1 whole chicken or turkey; 1 slice of fat bacon; water; celery (for serving); parsley (for serving); mushroom sauce (for serving); oyster sauce (for serving); simple white sauce (for serving); lemon (for garnish)

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Boil Chickens or Turkey

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Wrap the chicken or turkey in a cloth.
Skewer a slice of fat bacon on the breast of the fowl.

Cook

Place it in boiling water.
Boil gently for about 45 minutes for chicken or 1 hour and 45 minutes for turkey.

Serve

Serve with celery, parsley, mushroom sauce, oyster sauce, or simple white sauce.
Garnish with lemon.

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.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,810 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,467 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Chicken + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,172 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).
Celery + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,006 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken or turkey: Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and moist during gentle simmering.
Fat bacon: Melting fat slowly bastes the breast meat, adding moisture and savory flavor.

The step that matters

Boil gently. A gentle simmer cooks the meat through without toughening its proteins. A hard boil makes the meat tough and dry, and the cooking time differs for chicken and turkey.

“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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To Boil Chickens or Turkey