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Brown Fricassee of Chicken

A chicken fricassee made with salt pork, flour, and boiling water, finished with pepper, onion juice, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Brown Fricassee of Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and dress the chicken, then cut it into pieces.

Make the fricassee

  1. In a saucepan, brown the salt pork.

  2. Add the chicken pieces and brown them nicely.

  3. Stir in the flour and cook until brown.

  4. Add the boiling water and salt, then cover and let simmer until done.

Serve

  1. Transfer the chicken to a hot platter.

  2. Add pepper and onion juice to the gravy, then pour it over the chicken.

  3. Garnish with parsley.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Pork + chickentop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,417 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender as it simmers in the liquid.
Salt pork
Renders fat for browning the chicken and adds savory flavor to the base.
Flour
Browned with the fat, then thickens the boiling water into a gravy.
Boiling water
Forms the liquid that simmers the chicken and becomes the gravy.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and cook until brown. Flour must cook in the hot fat long enough to lose its raw taste and brown lightly, and adding the water too early can leave lumps. Stirring keeps it smooth.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, chicken, flour, pepper, onion. 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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