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Chicken Jelly

A gelatinous broth made by simmering chicken and bones for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Chicken Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the chicken into very small pieces and bruise the bones.

  2. Place the chicken and bones into a stone jar with a tight cover.

Cook and strain

  1. Set the jar in a large kettle of boiling water and boil for 3 hours.

  2. Strain the liquid and season with salt, pepper, and mace, or with loaf sugar and lemon juice as desired.

  3. Return the chicken fragments to the jar and boil again in the kettle to collect more jelly.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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
Supplies the protein and collagen that set the broth into a jelly as it cooks.
Chicken bones
Release gelatin into the liquid during long simmering, adding body and setting strength.

The step that matters

Keeping the jar in gentle, sustained boiling for the full 3 hours. Collagen in the chicken and bones must break down slowly into gelatin. A tight-covered jar in a kettle of boiling water keeps the contents moist and extracts the gelatin without drying or losing liquid, so the strained liquid sets into a jelly.

“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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