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Chicken Jelly

A gelatinous dish made by boiling a young chicken with rice, reducing the broth, and setting the strained liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Chicken and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,769 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Chicken Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and boil

  1. Pound a cleaned young chicken, bones included.

  2. Boil the chicken in 1 gallon of water with a little salt.

  3. Tie the rice in a cloth and add it to the pot until soft.

Reduce and set

  1. Remove the rice and boil the mixture down to 1 pint.

  2. Strain the jelly from the chicken and let it cool.

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 + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Young chicken
Its bones and connective tissue release gelatin, which gives the cooled broth its jelly-like set.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture down to 1 pint. Reducing the broth concentrates the dissolved gelatin. If it is reduced too little, the cooled liquid may stay too loose to set as an aspic.

“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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