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Roast Chicken or Fowl

A whole chicken or fowl roasted with butter, trussed, basted, and served with bread sauce, lemon, and optional cress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Roast Chicken or Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Singe the chicken.

  2. Dress the chicken.

  3. Put 2 tablespoons of butter inside the body.

  4. Sew it up with thread.

  5. Truss the chicken.

Roast

  1. Place 2 tablespoons of butter in the dripping pan.

  2. Baste the chicken with the butter.

  3. Roast the chicken for 1 hour.

  4. Dredge with coarse sea salt when nearly done.

  5. Prick with a fork to check if done.

Serve

  1. Serve with cress seasoned with salt, pepper, and vinegar around the dish, if desired.

  2. Garnish with sliced lemon.

  3. Serve bread sauce separately.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

  4. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Chicken
Forms the main body of the dish and supplies the meat that cooks through in the oven.
Butter
Adds moisture and richness, and helps the skin brown as it bastes the bird.

The step that matters

Prick with a fork to check if done. Juices running clear and firm flesh show the bird is cooked through. Stopping too early leaves the meat undercooked near the bone, while overcooking dries the breast.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, butter, pepper, vinegar, bread, sauce):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Grapefits about as well
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, pepper, vinegar, bread, sauce. 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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