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Chicken Jelly

Chicken jelly is a chilled, gelatinous chicken broth set with buttered bread slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chicken Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Place the chicken in a pot and cover it with water.

  2. Stew gently until the meat falls off the bones and the broth reduces to about 1 pint.

  3. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  4. Strain the broth through a colander and then through a coarse cloth.

  5. Cook the strained broth for a few more minutes over heat.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the broth into an earthen dish and refrigerate until it hardens.

  2. Serve cold, sliced, and enjoy in sandwiches with buttered bread.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

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

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

  4. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  5. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

What each ingredient does

Whole chicken
Provides the meat and collagen-rich bones that release gelatin into the broth.
Water
Extracts flavour and gelatin from the chicken during the slow stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the buttered bread served with the jelly.

The step that matters

Stew gently until the meat falls off the bones and the broth reduces to about 1 pint. Gentle simmering extracts gelatin from the bones and connective tissue without making the broth cloudy. Boiling hard emulsifies fat and clouds the liquid, and the jelly will not set firmly if too little gelatin is extracted or the broth is not reduced enough.

“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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