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Boiled Chicken

A boiled chicken served with egg sauce, optionally with rice, and soup made from the cooking water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,769 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Boiled Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the chicken as you would for roasting.

  2. Dredge the chicken with flour.

Cook

  1. Place the chicken in a pot and cover it with cold water.

  2. If desired, boil 1 cup of rice with the chicken.

  3. Let it simmer for 2 hours or until cooked through.

Serve

  1. Serve with egg sauce.

  2. Use the leftover water to make soup.

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

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

  2. Flour + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Chicken + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Chicken and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,559 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, which firms up and turns opaque as it cooks through.
Flour
Coats the chicken, giving a light surface that helps the skin hold together during cooking.

The step that matters

Let it simmer until cooked through. An older chicken is tough and needs long, gentle simmering so the connective tissue softens. Boiling hard can toughen the meat, so keep the liquid at a gentle simmer.

“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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