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Chicken Blanquette

A creamy sauce of butter, flour, stock, milk, lemon, paprika, and egg yolks served over chicken pieces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Chicken Blanquette

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour to make a roux, cooking for a minute.

  3. Gradually add the chicken stock and milk, stirring until smooth.

  4. Add the lemon juice, paprika, and salt, mixing well.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in the egg yolks.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the chicken pieces and serve.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Meat + chickentop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Forms a roux with the butter that thickens the sauce.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce as they set gently with residual heat.
Butter
Carries fat for the roux and adds richness to the sauce.
Milk
Adds body and creaminess to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks off the heat. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat and can scramble or curdle if the sauce is too hot. Removing the pan from the heat before adding them keeps the sauce smooth and creamy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, chicken, milk, 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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