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Chicken with Bacon and Sauce

Roasted chickens stuffed with onion, thyme, bay leaf, and egg yolks, served with a butter‑flour sauce flavored with stock, vinegar, anchovy, capers, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,585 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Chicken with Bacon and Sauce

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 stuffing

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Mix the onion, thyme, bay leaf, salt, pepper, butter, and egg yolks to create the stuffing.

  3. Stuff the chickens with the mixture and sew them closed.

Roast the chicken

  1. Place the chickens in a roasting pan and surround them with bacon.

  2. Roast in the oven until cooked through.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Melt the butter and flour mixture in a saucepan.

  2. Add stock, vinegar, anchovy, capers, salt, and nutmeg, and thicken over low heat.

  3. Serve the roasted chickens with the sauce.

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. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  2. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Egg yolks
Bind the stuffing and enrich the sauce, helping it thicken and set.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour, and with flour forms the roux that thickens the sauce.
Bacon
Bastes the chicken as it renders, adding savoury fat and flavour to the meat.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it reduces gently over low heat.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens and balances the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce over low heat. Flour and butter form a roux that thickens the stock only when heated gently. High heat can scorch the roux or cause lumps, and egg yolks in the sauce can curdle if it boils.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, thyme, pepper, butter, egg, flour, vinegar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, thyme, pepper, butter, egg, flour, vinegar. 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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