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Braised Chicken

Braised chicken with vegetables, salt pork, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Braised Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Dredge the chicken in flour, coarse sea salt, and black pepper.

  2. Brown the chicken all over in hot butter or chicken fat.

Braise

  1. Place the chicken in a roasting pan on a bed of sliced onion, carrot, turnip, and celery.

  2. Cover the chicken with four slices of salt pork and add two cups of water.

  3. Cover the pan tightly and roast for three hours, basting often and replenishing the water to keep about two cups in the pan.

Serve

  1. Remove the chicken to a platter and garnish with the vegetables.

  2. Make a gravy from the liquid in the pan and season to taste.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Old chicken
Provides the meat that becomes tender through long, moist cooking.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory flavor that bastes the chicken as it renders.
Flour
Coats the chicken and helps thicken the pan liquid into gravy.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aroma to the braising liquid and gravy.
Butter or chicken fat
Browns the chicken surface through direct contact with hot fat.

The step that matters

Covered roasting with replenished water. Long, covered cooking in a moist environment breaks down tough connective tissue in an old bird. If the pan runs dry, the chicken can scorch and turn tough, so the water must be topped up to keep about two cups in the pan.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, flour, pepper, butter, carrot, turnip, celery):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, flour, pepper, butter, carrot, turnip, celery. 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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