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Fricasseed Chicken

Fricassee Chicken is a stew of whole chickens cooked with onion, parsley, mace, butter, flour, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,814 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Fricasseed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stuff the chickens as if to boil.

  2. Place the stuffed chickens in a pot.

  3. Add enough water to almost cover the chickens.

  4. Chop the onion, parsley, and mace.

Cook

  1. Cook for 2 hours.

Finish the sauce

  1. Rub the butter with the flour and stir in.

  2. Beat the egg yolks.

  3. Carefully stir the beaten yolks into the pot.

  4. Cook for an additional 5 minutes.

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. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Parsley + macetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and richness, and helps the flour blend smoothly.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce when mixed with butter.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and add richness as they set gently in the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Stirring the beaten yolks into the pot. Egg yolks scramble if they get too hot too fast. Stir them in carefully, off the boil or with some hot liquid first, so the sauce thickens smoothly rather than curdling.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, onion, parsley, butter, flour, egg):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, parsley, butter, flour, egg. 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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