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Delicious Cream Gravy for Chicken

A creamy gravy made with butter, flour, and thick sweet cream, served over chicken.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Delicious Cream Gravy for Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper.

  2. Cook the chicken gently in a covered saucepan with enough water to make ½ pint of broth, without adding more water during cooking.

  3. Once cooked, pour off the broth without straining.

Make the gravy

  1. In a separate bowl, cream together the butter and flour to make a paste.

  2. Add the paste to the broth and let it boil for a few minutes to cook the flour.

  3. Stir in the thick sweet cream and heat quickly before serving.

Serve

  1. Pour the gravy over the hot chicken and serve immediately.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the gravy while helping form the paste.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth gravy when cooked through.
Thick sweet cream
Adds body, richness and a smooth, silky texture to the gravy.
Tender chicken
Provides the cooked meat and the broth that forms the gravy base.

The step that matters

Boiling the flour paste in the broth. Flour must boil for a few minutes to lose its raw starchy taste and to thicken properly; undercooked flour leaves the gravy pasty. Adding the cream last and heating it quickly keeps it from curdling or thinning out.

“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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