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Stewed Prairie Chicken

A slow-cooked chicken stew with onion, salt, pepper, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Stewed Prairie Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the chicken pieces in a pan and add enough water to just cover them.

  2. Add the sliced onion, salt, and pepper.

Stew and thicken

  1. Stew the chicken very slowly for 4 hours without allowing it to boil.

  2. Thicken the liquid with a mixture of butter and flour.

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 + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

Chicken
Provides the main protein and flavour, becoming tender during long, slow stewing.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and savoury depth to the stewing liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and combines with flour to form a roux that thickens the liquid.
Flour
Thickens the stewing liquid when cooked with butter, giving it body.

The step that matters

Stew without boiling. A gentle simmer keeps the chicken tender and moist. A rolling boil toughens muscle proteins and can make the meat stringy and the liquid cloudy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, butter, 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.

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