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Pulled Turkey, Fowl, or Chicken

A dish of shredded chicken, turkey, or fowl simmered with broth, mace, eschalot, lemon, and spices, then broiled and served.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Pulled Turkey, Fowl, or Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Skin the cold chicken, fowl, or turkey and remove the fillets from the breasts.

  2. Place the fillets, white meat, wings, side-bones, and merry-thought in a stew-pan.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the broth, pounded mace, minced eschalot, lemon juice, lemon peel, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Thicken the mixture with flour and butter, then simmer for 2-3 minutes until the meat is warm.

  3. For added richness, stir in cream or egg yolks before serving.

Broil and serve

  1. Score the legs and rump, season with pepper and salt, and broil until nicely browned.

  2. Serve the broiled legs and rump on or around the pulled chicken.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

Cold chicken, fowl, or turkey
Provides the meat that is pulled and forms the body of the dish.
Broth
Supplies the liquid that moistens the meat and forms the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the meat.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the thickened sauce.
Cream or egg yolks
Adds richness and body to the sauce when stirred in before serving.

The step that matters

Broil the legs and rump. Broiling browns the surface through high direct heat, creating flavor through browning. Scoring helps seasoning penetrate and lets the surface brown evenly, so watch closely to avoid scorching.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

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