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Pressed Chicken with Jelly

A dish of boiled chicken pressed into a mold with a savory jelly made from the chicken stock, cream, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Pressed Chicken with Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken with minimal water, mace, salt, pepper, and onion until cooked.

  2. Remove the bones from the meat.

  3. Return the bones to the pot and boil down into a jelly.

Make the filling

  1. Chop the meat and liver finely until soft.

  2. Season the mixture with one chopped onion, cream, egg yolk, nutmeg, and butter.

  3. Strain the jelly.

Press and set

  1. Pour part of the strained jelly into a mold.

  2. Press the meat mixture on top, leaving space around it.

  3. Pour the remaining jelly over the pressed meat.

  4. Once set, turn out the mold.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 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 pressed, and the bones that boil down into the setting jelly.
Heavy cream
Adds richness and a soft, moist texture to the chopped meat mixture.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps bind the chopped meat mixture together.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, moister texture in the filling.
Onion
Adds aromatic flavor to the chicken broth and to the filling.

The step that matters

Boil the bones down into a jelly. The bones must reduce until the liquid has enough natural gelatin to set firmly when cooled. If it is too thin, the pressed mold will not hold its shape when turned out.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, onion, cream, egg, nutmeg, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, onion, cream, egg, nutmeg, butter. 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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