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Chicken Jelly

Chicken jelly is a gelatinous chicken broth set with butter and bread, served cold in 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 with enough water to cover it slightly.

  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. Return to the heat and cook for a few more minutes.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into an earthen dish and refrigerate until set.

  2. Serve cold in slices, optionally with thinly sliced 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 meat and collagen-rich bones that release gelatin into the broth as it stews.
Water
Extracts flavor and gelatin from the chicken, forming the broth that will set.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded flavor to the bread served alongside the aspic.

The step that matters

Stew gently until the meat falls off the bones and the broth reduces to about 1 pint.. Gentle simmering draws gelatin from the bones without clouding the broth. Boiling hard emulsifies fat and cloudiness into the liquid, and too little reduction leaves too little gelatin to set the aspic firmly.

“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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