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Pickled Chicken

Pickled chicken is chicken meat preserved in cider vinegar and water with optional whole spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cider and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,431 recipes. Both carry 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol, which smells smoky, clove. The science ↓

Pickled Chicken

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Boil the chickens until the meat falls off the bones.

  2. Place the meat in a stone jar.

Pickle and serve

  1. Mix the cider vinegar with the water used for boiling.

  2. Pour the mixture over the chicken meat.

  3. Add whole spices if desired.

  4. Let it sit for two days before serving.

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. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  2. Chicken + cidertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Chicken + vinegartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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 is softened by boiling and then pickled in the vinegar mixture.
Cider vinegar
Acidity that preserves the meat and gives it a sharp, tangy flavour.

The step that matters

Letting the chicken sit for two days. The acid from the vinegar needs time to soak into the meat and flavour it fully. Serving too early leaves the chicken tasting mostly of boiled meat rather than pickled.

“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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