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Chicken a LA Maryland

A chicken soup with onion, carrot, turnip, celery, bay leaf, cloves, peppercorns, and tomatoes, served with toast or fried bread baskets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Chicken a LA Maryland

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Clean the chicken and remove the head and legs.

  2. Place the chicken in a pot of warm water, covering it completely.

  3. Add the onion, carrot, turnip, bay leaf, cloves, peppercorns, and celery.

  4. Cook slowly until the chicken is tender.

Make the sauce

  1. Remove the meat from the bones and cut it into two-inch pieces.

  2. Reduce the stock to one cup.

  3. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  4. Add the flour and stir until smooth.

  5. Gradually stir in the cup of stock.

  6. Add the strained tomatoes and chicken.

  7. Cook for ten minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve surrounded by points of toast or in fried bread baskets.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow, gentle cooking.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour when melted with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Chicken stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, reduced to concentrate its flavour.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and colour, giving the sauce its characteristic tang and hue.

The step that matters

Gradually stir in the stock. Adding liquid slowly to the hot butter and flour lets the starch disperse evenly. Adding it all at once can form lumps that are hard to smooth out.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, butter, flour):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, butter, 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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