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Chicken for Lunch

A creamy chicken stew made with water, rich cream, flour, milk, eggs, butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Chicken for Lunch

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Stew the chicken in 1 pint of water in a double boiler until tender.

  2. Remove the chicken and pour 1 pint of rich cream into the broth.

  3. Add a lump of butter to the boiling water.

Make the sauce

  1. Thicken the mixture with a little flour and milk.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Just before serving, stir in the yolks of 2 eggs.

  4. Season the chicken with salt and pepper.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Chicken
Provides the main body of the dish and the meat that is served.
Rich cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid so the sauce clings to the chicken.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce, adding body and a smooth finish.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks just before serving. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble and turn grainy if they get too hot or boil. Adding them off the heat at the end keeps the sauce smooth.

“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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