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Potted Chicken, Grouse, or Other Birds

A method of cooking a whole or cut bird in a pot with onion, salt, pepper, flour, and water until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,814 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Potted Chicken, Grouse, or Other Birds

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. If the bird is large, cut it into small pieces; otherwise, cook it whole.

  2. In a pan, sauté or fry the bird until lightly browned.

Make the potted meat

  1. In a jar, combine the bird, onion, salt, pepper, brown flour, and enough water to make a sauce.

  2. Cook the jar slowly until the meat is very tender: 2 to 2.5 hours if pre-cooked, or 4 hours if raw.

Finish the bird

  1. Cut off the wings and legs, pot them.

  2. Roast the rest of the bird to your desired doneness.

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

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Whole bird
Provides the meat, whose connective tissue softens into tender shreds during long, slow cooking.
Onion
Adds aroma and gentle sweetness as it softens and flavors the cooking liquid.
Brown flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce that binds the meat.

The step that matters

Cook the jar slowly until the meat is very tender. Tough connective tissue only breaks down into tender meat after a long, gentle cook at low heat. Stopping early leaves the meat chewy, so follow the stated time for whether the bird was pre-cooked or raw.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, flour. 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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