Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Legs, Stuffed

Chicken legs stuffed with breadcrumb mixture, wrapped in bacon, baked until cooked.

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

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Chicken Legs, Stuffed

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the legs

  1. Cut each leg into two joints and remove the drumsticks.

  2. Season the legs with salt and pepper, then moisten with sweet oil.

Make the stuffing

  1. In a bowl, mix breadcrumbs, lemon rind, sweet herbs, onion, and parsley.

  2. Moisten the mixture with the yolk of the egg and season with salt and cayenne.

Stuff, bake and serve

  1. Drain the chicken legs, cover each with the stuffing, and wrap in a slice of bacon.

  2. Secure with twine or skewers.

  3. Place on a greased baking tray and bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 20 minutes.

  4. Cut each slice of toasted bread in half, arrange the chicken legs on top, garnish with parsley, and serve hot.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Legs of a cold fowl
Provide the meat that is wrapped around the stuffing and cooked through.
Breadcrumbs
Bind with the egg and absorb moisture to form a soft, cohesive stuffing.
Egg
Yolk moistens and binds the stuffing so it holds together around the chicken.
Streaky bacon
Fat from the bacon bastes the chicken and browns the outside as it bakes.
Sweet oil
Moistens the chicken surface, helping it brown evenly and avoid drying out.

The step that matters

Securing the bacon-wrapped legs. If the bacon and stuffing are not held firmly in place with twine or skewers, the stuffing can fall out and the bacon may unwind as it bakes, so the legs cook unevenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, parsley, egg, bread, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, parsley, egg, bread, pepper. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes