Skip to main content
Main

Pressed Chicken

A pressed chicken loaf made by stewing chicken, seasoning, removing bones, coarsely chopping meat, and pressing it in a pan to set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chicken and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,958 recipes. Both carry piperonal, which smells bitter, coconut. The science ↓

Pressed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Clean the chickens.

  2. Cut the chickens up.

  3. Stew them in enough water to cover.

Stew and season

  1. When nearly cooked, season with salt and pepper.

  2. Let them stew until the water is mostly boiled out and the meat falls from the bones.

  3. Remove the bones and gristle.

  4. Coarsely chop the meat.

  5. Return the meat to the stew pot with the remaining broth.

  6. Skim off any fat.

  7. Heat through again.

Press and set

  1. Pour the mixture into a square bread pan.

  2. Place a platter on top.

  3. Weigh it down.

  4. Let it cool until set.

  5. Slice.

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 + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

What each ingredient does

Chickens
Provide the meat that becomes the body of the pressed loaf.
Water
Cooks the chicken gently and forms the broth that binds the pressed meat.

The step that matters

Let the water boil out until the meat falls from the bones. Reducing the broth concentrates its natural gelatin from the bones and gristle, which helps the chopped meat hold together and set firmly when pressed and cooled. Stopping too early leaves it loose and watery.

“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.

More pressed chicken recipes

with Egg 3 See all 141 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes