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Chicken and Vegetable Stew

A stew of boiled chicken with sweet corn, lima beans, bacon, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and lima beans work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 222 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Chicken and Vegetable Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the chickens by breaking the breast-bone and flattening them with a rolling pin.

Make the stew

  1. Place the chickens in a stewpan with 1 pint of water and bring to a simmer.

  2. Mix the butter with the flour until smooth and add to the stewpan.

  3. Add the sweet corn, Lima beans, bacon, pepper, salt, and cayenne to the stewpan.

  4. Let the stew cook slowly until the chickens are done.

Serve

  1. Serve the chickens in the center of a platter with corn and beans arranged around them.

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. Corn + lima beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together222 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Chicken + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 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

Chickens
Provide the main protein, and their bones and juices give the stew body and savory depth.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and gives a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so the stew becomes smooth and lightly bodied.
Lima beans
Add starchy body and a creamy texture as they cook slowly in the stew.
Sweet corn
Adds natural sweetness and tender texture to the stew.

The step that matters

Cooking the stew slowly until the chickens are done. Slow simmering keeps the chicken tender and lets collagen in the joints break down, while a hard boil can toughen the meat and cloud the liquid.

Swap the lima beans

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

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Lima beansthe original

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