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Chicken with Cream Sauce, Vermont Style

A chicken dish simmered in milk and cream sauce with salt pork, corn starch thickening, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,417 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Chicken with Cream Sauce, Vermont Style

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Cut each chicken into eight parts and place them in a flat saucepan with 1 pint of water over brisk heat.

  2. Cook until the broth is reduced and the chickens are cooked through.

Make the cream sauce

  1. Add 1 quart of milk and bring to a boil.

  2. Dissolve 3 tablespoons of corn starch in ½ cup of cold milk, then add to the boiling mixture.

  3. Fry the salt pork pieces until well cooked.

  4. Add the cooked salt pork and half of its grease to the chicken.

  5. Cook for an additional 10 minutes.

  6. Season with salt, red pepper, and nutmeg before serving.

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 + porktop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,417 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Corn + porktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,069 recipes

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

  4. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Corn + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Chickens
Provide the main meat, which cooks down in the broth and milk mixture.
Milk
Forms the base of the cream sauce, giving it richness and a creamy body.
Corn starch
Thickens the boiling milk into a smooth sauce as it gelatinizes with heat.
Salt pork
Adds savory fat and flavor to the dish through its rendered grease.

The step that matters

Add the corn starch mixture to the boiling milk. Corn starch must be fully dissolved in cold milk first, then added to boiling liquid and stirred, so it thickens evenly without lumps.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Basilfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, milk, corn, pork, 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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