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Terrapin Chicken

A stew of chicken pieces flavored with allspice, cloves, mace, and buttered egg yolks, finished with sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Terrapin Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Make the chicken

  1. Stew the chicken pieces in a pot.

  2. Add ground allspice, cloves, mace, salt, and pepper.

  3. Cook for 10 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Work the butter into the yolks of the hard boiled eggs.

  2. Combine the butter and egg yolks with the chicken mixture.

  3. Serve in a tureen and add sherry 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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Allspice + macetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Forms the main body of the dish and provides the savory meat base.
Hard boiled egg yolks
Enrich the sauce with richness and help it thicken and turn creamy.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the yolks a smooth, rounded texture.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the finished dish.

The step that matters

Combining the butter and egg yolks with the chicken mixture. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can curdle or turn grainy if they get too hot or are added to a boiling liquid. Working the butter into the yolks first helps them blend smoothly before they meet the hot chicken.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, allspice, clove, pepper, butter, egg, sherry):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, allspice, clove, pepper, butter, egg, sherry. 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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