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Pressed Chicken

Pressed Chicken is a chilled chicken dish made by cooking, shredding, simmering in broth, and refrigerating.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Pressed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Cook the fowl until the meat falls from the bones while boiling.

  2. Remove the meat from the broth.

  3. Chop the meat finely.

Make the broth

  1. Season the broth with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  2. Let the broth cool.

  3. Remove all fat from the broth.

  4. Reheat the broth.

  5. Reduce the broth to about 1 pint.

Press and set

  1. Cook the chopped chicken in the broth for a few minutes.

  2. Place the cooked mixture in a medium-sized bread pan.

  3. Refrigerate overnight.

  4. Garnish with parsley and sliced lemon 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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Onion + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

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

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the meat and the flavorful broth that binds the dish together.
Chicken broth
Adds moisture and savory flavor, and its gelatin helps the chopped meat set when chilled.
Lard or clear bacon fat
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the pressed meat.

The step that matters

Removing all fat from the broth. Fat left in the broth can stop it from setting firmly and can make the pressed chicken greasy and loose when sliced.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, chicken, parsley, lemon):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, chicken, parsley, lemon. 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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