Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Chicken with Oysters

A stewed chicken filled with oysters, thickened with a flour slurry and seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper.

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

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Chicken with Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook the chicken

  1. Remove the gills from the oysters and fill the inside of the chicken with them.

  2. Place the chicken in a jar and cover it tightly.

  3. Put the jar in a pot of water and boil for 1.5 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. In a small bowl, mix the flour with a little cold water until smooth.

  2. Add the flour mixture to the gravy from the chicken and oysters.

  3. Season the sauce with butter, salt, and pepper to taste.

  4. Add more oysters to the sauce.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce with the chicken.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

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

  4. Chicken + oystertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together972 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

Flour and butter 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
Forms the main body of the dish and, cooked gently in liquid, stays moist and tender.
Oysters
Release briny, savory flavor into the gravy and sauce while the chicken cooks.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as its starch swells when heated, giving the sauce body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture to the gravy. Flour must be fully smooth before it goes in, and the gravy should be hot and stirred as it is added. Starch granules swell and thicken only when heated, and unmixed flour clumps into lumps.

“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