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Soup

Cream of Chicken

A creamy soup made with chicken stock, butter, flour, minced chicken, mace, cream, sugar, and topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cream of Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine hot chicken stock in a pot and season well.

  2. Blend butter and flour until smooth, then add to the stock.

  3. Stir until the mixture is smooth.

  4. Add minced chicken, mace, hot cream or milk, and sugar.

Serve

  1. Serve topped with whipped cream.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

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

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

Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, lightly body-rich soup.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and blends with flour to form a roux base.
Hot cream or rich milk
Adds fat and creaminess, giving the soup a smooth, rounded texture.
Minced chicken
Adds meaty body and chicken flavour to the soup.

The step that matters

Blend butter and flour until smooth, then add to the stock. Lumps form if flour is not fully blended with the butter before liquid is added. Mixing them into a smooth paste first lets the starch disperse evenly, so the soup thickens without clumps.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, flour, cream, sugar. 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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