Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Stewed in Milk

A chicken stew cooked slowly in milk with mace, flour, and seasonings, thickened into a sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mace and white pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,695 recipes. Both carry myrcene, which smells balsamic, herbaceous. The science ↓

Chicken Stewed in Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cut the chicken into neat joints and remove as much skin as possible.

  2. Wipe the pieces with a damp cloth.

  3. Place the chicken in a jar with the milk, mace, pepper, and salt.

Cook gently

  1. Cover the jar with a lid or greased paper and place it in a saucepan with hot water halfway up the jar.

  2. Cover the saucepan and simmer gently for 2 to 3 hours until the chicken is tender.

  3. Once cooked, remove the chicken pieces and keep them warm.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour the milk into a saucepan.

  2. Remove the mace.

  3. Mix the flour with a little cold milk in a basin.

  4. Add the flour mixture to the milk in the pan and stir until it boils and thickens.

  5. Adjust seasoning if necessary.

  6. Add a small piece of butter or 1 tablespoon of cream before serving.

  7. Pour the sauce over the chicken to coat it nicely.

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. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  5. Chicken + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 protein, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Milk
Forms the cooking liquid and, once thickened, the creamy sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce when heated and stirred.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture to the milk. Flour must be mixed into cold milk first and then stirred while the liquid heats; adding it dry or all at once can form lumps. Stirring until it boils lets the starch swell and thicken the sauce evenly.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, milk, mace, flour):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, milk, mace, 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.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes