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Roast Chicken

Roast Chicken is a whole chicken seasoned with pepper and salt, stuffed with buttered bread crumbs, baked with butter and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Roast Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Season the inside of the chicken with pepper and salt.

  3. Butter the bread generously and cut it into tiny bits.

  4. Fill the body of the chicken with the buttered crumbs or any preferred dressing.

Roast and serve

  1. Place the chicken in a roasting pan with 1 ounce of butter and ½ cup of water.

  2. Baste the chicken often while it bakes.

  3. Bake for about 1 hour if the chicken is young and tender; longer if older.

  4. Serve with giblet gravy and crab apple 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

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

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

  4. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  5. 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

Chicken
Provides the main protein, which cooks through in the oven and forms the centre of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the skin brown and the bread crumbs taste savoury.
Bread
Forms the dressing that fills the cavity, soaking up juices and adding soft texture.
Water
Creates steam in the roasting pan, keeping the pan moist and helping drippings stay loose.

The step that matters

Baste the chicken often while it bakes. Basting spreads melted butter and pan juices over the skin, which helps it brown evenly and stay moist while the meat cooks through.

“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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