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Roast Chicken

Roast chicken wrapped in bacon, seasoned with sea salt, vinegar, and butter, served with cress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,902 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Roast Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Roast

  1. Place the chicken between the slices of bacon and secure the feet to the spit.

  2. Baste the chicken with its own gravy while roasting.

  3. Cover the chicken and bacon with buttered paper until 5 minutes before done.

  4. Remove the paper and finish roasting over a bright fire.

Serve

  1. Serve with cress seasoned with salt and vinegar.

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. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  2. Vinegar + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Chicken + vinegartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon
Lays over the chicken to add fat and flavour as it roasts.
Butter
Covers the chicken to keep it moist and promote gentle, even cooking.
Chicken
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked through by roasting.

The step that matters

Remove the paper and finish roasting over a bright fire. Removing the buttered paper lets the skin brown and crisp. Covered roasting keeps the meat moist, but without a final hot finish the skin stays pale and soft.

“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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