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Chicken in Cream Sauce

Chicken in Cream Sauce is cooked chicken served in a sauce of stock, cream, egg yolks, and lemon juice, with toast and rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 in Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Gradually stir the cream into the stock.

  2. Cook for 10 minutes.

  3. Add the beaten egg yolks and cook for 5 minutes without boiling.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in the lemon juice.

Assemble and serve

  1. Cut the chicken into small pieces and add to the sauce.

  2. Serve on toast, surrounded by a border of rice.

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).

  2. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + chickentop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

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

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  5. Cream + ricetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they set gently with heat, giving it a smooth, rich body.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the cream and yolks enrich.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Add the egg yolks without boiling. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat and will curdle or scramble if the sauce boils, leaving a grainy texture instead of a smooth custard-like sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, egg, chicken, rice):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Pumpkinfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, egg, chicken, rice. 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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