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Devilled Chicken

A chicken leg dish coated in a mustard, Worcestershire, cayenne, mushroom ketchup sauce and grilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Devilled Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Use the legs of the chicken, scoring them all over with a knife close to the bone.

Make the sauce

  1. Make a thick sauce with the mustard, Worcestershire sauce, cayenne pepper, mushroom ketchup, salt, and pepper.

  2. If the sauce is too thick, add a little water for moisture.

Coat and grill

  1. Cover the chicken legs with the sauce, pressing it into the cuts.

  2. Place the chicken under a gas grill and cook for about 10 minutes.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Chicken + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  3. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Chicken + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,192 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold chicken
Provides the meat that the sauce coats and the grill heats through.
Mustard
Adds sharp pungency and helps the sauce hold together as a thick coating.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savoury depth and tang to the sauce.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury, umami flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Watch the sauce under the grill. The sauce contains sugars and mustard solids that can scorch quickly under strong direct heat, so the coating may burn before the chicken is fully cooked through. Checking the legs during the 10 minutes helps prevent this.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, sauce, pepper, mushroom, ketchup. 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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