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Atlanta Creamed Chicken

Creamed chicken made with stewed spring chickens, butter, cream, flour, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Atlanta Creamed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Cut up the spring chickens and stew them until tender, adding pepper, salt, and butter.

Make the sauce

  1. Just before serving, mix the cream with flour and butter until thickened.

Finish and serve

  1. Pour the thickened cream over the chicken and let it boil once.

  2. Serve in a tureen, garnished with chopped parsley.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

Spring chickens
Provide the main protein, which becomes tender through slow stewing.
Cream
Forms the rich, smooth sauce that coats the chicken.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a sauce body when cooked with butter.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the stew and helps form the thickened sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the thickened cream. Once flour-thickened cream is added, letting it boil only once helps keep the sauce smooth. Repeated boiling can cause the cream to separate or turn grainy.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

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