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Pressed Chicken

A dish of shredded chicken pressed into a mold with broth, garnished with vegetables and optional truffles or pickles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Pressed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken in just enough water until the meat slips from the bones.

  2. Remove the skin, pick the meat apart, and discard all the fat.

  3. Season the broth with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and celery salt, and cook the celery with the chicken.

  4. Reduce the broth to one cup.

Mold and set

  1. Butter a mold and decorate it with slices of hard-boiled egg, truffles, sliced pickles, and olives if desired.

  2. Pack the meat into the mold, mixing light and dark meat.

  3. Pour some of the broth over each layer of meat until all is used.

  4. Set aside until cold, placing a weight on top.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, remove from the mold and garnish with lettuce, parsley, watercress, halved hard-boiled eggs, radishes, or olives.

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. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

  3. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Chicken + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,888 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid hexyl ester (sweet, green).

  5. Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the meat that is packed and pressed into a firm, sliceable shape.
Broth (in the method)
Carries the seasoning and binds the meat layers together as it cools and sets.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavor to the broth as it cooks with the chicken.

The step that matters

Set aside until cold, placing a weight on top.. Gelatin from the bones and skin sets as the broth cools, which holds the pressed meat together. Pressing while it cools helps compact the layers so the loaf slices cleanly rather than crumbling.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, butter, egg, truffle, olive, lettuce):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, butter, egg, truffle, olive, lettuce. 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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