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Boiled Chicken

A whole chicken boiled with lemon, salt, butter, and optional vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Choose a small, plump chicken and truss it for boiling.

  2. Rub the chicken with lemon juice and wrap it in buttered paper, tying it with string.

Boil

  1. Place the chicken in a saucepan of boiling water with salt.

  2. If using, add the sliced carrot, turnip, and onion.

  3. Once the water re-boils, move the pan to a cooler part of the stove and simmer gently for about 1 hour.

  4. Remove the chicken from the pan, drain well, and take off the paper and string.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Lemon + carrottop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main protein, which firms and sets as it cooks in the water.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the chicken.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavor and helps keep the meat moist under the paper.

The step that matters

Keep the water at a gentle simmer. Once the water re-boils, lower the heat so it only simmers. Vigorous boiling makes the muscle proteins contract hard, which toughens the meat and can break the skin and the trussed shape.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, lemon, butter, turnip, onion. 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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