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Pulled Turkey, Fowl, or Chicken

Pulled poultry served with broiled legs and rump.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Pulled Turkey, Fowl, or Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skin the cold chicken, fowl, or turkey and remove the fillets from the breasts.

  2. Place the fillets, white meat, wings, side-bones, and merry-thought in a stew pan.

Make the sauce

  1. Add 2 cups of broth, pounded mace, minced shallot, lemon juice, lemon peel, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Thicken the mixture with flour and butter.

  3. Simmer for 2-3 minutes until the meat is warm.

  4. Stir in cream or egg yolks before serving for added richness.

Broil and serve

  1. Score the legs and rump.

  2. Season the legs and rump with pepper and salt.

  3. Broil until nicely browned.

  4. Serve the broiled legs and rump around the pulled chicken.

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

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

  2. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Chicken fillets
Provide the main body of tender meat that pulls apart into shreds.
Broth
Supplies the liquid that keeps the meat moist while it simmers.
Flour and butter
Thicken the cooking liquid into a smooth, lightly coating sauce.
Cream or egg yolks
Enrich the sauce with fat and body, making it richer and smoother.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the savory meat.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until the meat is just warm. Holding the mixture at a gentle simmer for only a few minutes keeps the meat moist and tender. Boiling it hard toughens muscle proteins and can make the sauce break or thicken unevenly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, meat, shallot, lemon, pepper, flour, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, meat, shallot, lemon, pepper, flour, butter. 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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