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Modern Cookery

A braised bird stuffed with forcemeat, livers, tongue, and bacon, wrapped in a cloth and simmered in broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Liver and veal match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 392 recipes. Both carry enoic acid, which smells butter, cheesy. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bird

  1. Bone the bird and remove the neck-bones and merrythought.

  2. Fill the legs and wings with forcemeat and the body with livers, tongue, sausage meat, or bacon.

  3. Sew up and truss the bird, or draw the legs and wings inside and flatten it on a table.

  4. Cover the bird with sausage meat and other ingredients evenly.

  5. Roll tightly and bind with a broad tape, then wrap in a thin pudding cloth and tie at both ends.

Stew and set

  1. Place in a braising pan or thick iron saucepan with chicken bones, herbs, carrots, bay leaves, mace, and peppercorns.

  2. Cover with veal broth and add salt if needed.

  3. Stew gently for 1 hour and 15 minutes to 1 hour and 30 minutes.

  4. Let cool in the cooking liquid, then boil down the gravy to a jelly.

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. Liver + vealtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together392 recipes

    Shared aroma: enoic acid (butter, cheesy).

  2. Chicken + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Chicken + vealtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

  4. Carrot + macetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Chicken + carrottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Bird
Forms the main body of the pudding and carries the stuffing and filling.
Forcemeat
Adds a firm, moist, savoury stuffing that holds its shape when sliced.
Chicken bones
Release gelatin into the broth, helping the gravy set to a jelly as it cools.
Veal broth
Provides the cooking liquid and the savoury base for the gravy.
Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the filling as it cooks.

The step that matters

Stew gently and let cool in the liquid. A gentle simmer keeps the meat tender and the wrapped pudding intact, while slow cooling in the liquid lets gelatin from the bones set the gravy into a jelly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, meat, liver, carrot, veal):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, meat, liver, carrot, veal. 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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