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To Pull Chickens

Pulled chicken meat served in gravy or cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Pull Chickens

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Remove the skin and pull the flesh off the bone of the cold fowl in large pieces.

  2. Dredge the pieces in flour.

  3. Fry them in butter until nicely browned.

  4. Drain the butter.

Make the sauce and toss the meat

  1. Simmer the flesh in well-seasoned gravy thickened with a little flour and butter.

  2. Add the juice of half a lemon.

  3. Pull the white meat into small flakes, free from skin.

  4. Toss the flakes with cream thickened with butter and flour, mace, white pepper, salt, and a squeeze of lemon.

Broil and plate

  1. Cut off the legs and the whole back of a dressed chicken.

  2. Cut off the neck-end of the chicken.

  3. Broil the back and sides in one piece, seasoning the two legs.

  4. Place the hash in the middle, with the back on top and the two legs at the end.

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

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

  2. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Lemon + white peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,658 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Fowl
Provides the meat that is pulled, fried and simmered into the dish.
Butter
Fat that browns the dredged meat and enriches the thickened sauce.
Flour
Coats the meat for browning and thickens the gravy and cream sauce.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness to the flakes, softening the mixture.
Gravy
Supplies the liquid base that the meat simmers in, adding savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Frying the dredged pieces in butter. Flour coating browns in hot fat through the Maillard reaction; if the butter is too cool the flour absorbs fat and turns greasy and pale, while overheating burns it before the meat is cooked through.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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