Skip to main content
Main

Prairie Chickens

Stuffed prairie chickens cooked in a steamer and oven, finished with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chicken and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,902 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Prairie Chickens

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. Clean the prairie chickens, rinse, and dry them.

  2. Fill the chickens with dressing and sew them up.

  3. Bind the legs and wings with cords.

Steam and bake

  1. Place them in a steamer over hot water and cook until just done.

  2. Transfer to a pan with a little butter.

  3. Bake in the oven at 400°F (200°C), basting frequently with melted butter until browned.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Prairie chickens
Provide the main meat, which is cooked gently by steaming and then browned in the oven.
Dressing
Fills the birds, adding moisture and flavour as it cooks inside the cavity.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the skin brown when basted during baking.

The step that matters

Steaming until just done. Steaming cooks the birds gently, but overcooking dries the meat before the final bake. Stopping at just done leaves moisture for the browning stage.

“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.

You might also like

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