Skip to main content
Main

To Pull Chickens

Chicken meat pulled from the bone, fried or broiled, served with gravy or cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Pull Chickens

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Remove the skin from the cold fowl.

  2. Pull the flesh from the bone in large pieces.

  3. Dredge the pieces in flour.

  4. Fry them in butter until nicely browned.

  5. Drain the butter.

Make the sauce and toss

  1. Simmer the flesh in well-seasoned gravy thickened with a little flour and butter.

  2. Add the juice of half a lemon.

  3. Pull the white meat into small flakes, free from skin.

  4. Toss the flakes with cream thickened with butter and flour, mace, white pepper, salt, and a squeeze of lemon.

Plate and serve

  1. Cut off the legs and back of a dressed chicken.

  2. Cut off the neck-end of the chicken.

  3. Broil the back and sides in one piece, seasoning the legs.

  4. Place the hash in the center, with the back on top and the two legs at the end.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Lemon + white peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,658 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the main meat, which is pulled into pieces and simmered until tender.
Flour
Coats the pieces for browning and thickens the gravy and cream sauces.
Butter
Browns the dredged meat and enriches the thickened sauces with fat and flavour.
Gravy
Supplies the seasoned liquid in which the flesh simmers, carrying flavour into the meat.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the tossed flakes.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the savoury flavours of the meat and sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the dredged pieces in butter. Flour coating and hot butter must brown the surface without burning it; if the butter is too hot or the pan crowded, the flour scorches and the pieces steam instead of browning.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, lemon, cream, mace):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, lemon, cream, mace. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes