Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Chicken Mushroom Gravy

A stew of chicken, mushrooms, and gravy served with dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chicken and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,172 recipes. Both carry 1-butyl acetate, which smells fruity, banana. The science ↓

Stewed Chicken Mushroom Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Joint the chicken and cover it with boiling water.

  2. Add soup greens and onion, season with coarse sea salt, and stew until tender.

  3. Remove the chicken and strain the broth.

Make the noodles and gravy

  1. To the broth, add noodles or rice and boil until cooked.

  2. Wash and soak the dried mushrooms for about one hour, then chop finely.

  3. Add the mushrooms to the remaining stock and boil until cooked.

  4. Thicken the gravy by frying the flour in butter until light yellow, then add to the mushroom stock.

  5. Season with paprika or red pepper and serve with dumplings.

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 + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  2. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

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

  3. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

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

  5. Rice + mushroomtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,515 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Stewing chicken
Provides the meat and rich flavour that the broth is built on.
Dried mushrooms
Add earthy aroma and flavour to the gravy once rehydrated and chopped.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a gravy when fried in butter first.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness and flavour to the gravy.

The step that matters

Frying the flour in butter. Cooking the flour in fat until light yellow cooks out its raw taste and lets it thicken the stock smoothly. Adding flour directly to liquid tends to form lumps.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, rice, mushroom, butter, flour, pepper. 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 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipes