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Stewed Chicken with Dumplings

Stewed chicken served with homemade dumplings and a milk-based gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,389 recipes. Both carry 1-hexanal, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Stewed Chicken with Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cover the chicken pieces with water and add salt in a pot. Stew until tender.

Make the dumplings

  1. Mix flour, baking powder, lard, and salt in a bowl. Add milk gradually until the dough is not sticky.

  2. Cut the dough into squares. Pour some chicken broth into a baking pan and lay the dumplings in it.

  3. Bake the dumplings at 400°F (200°C) until golden brown.

Assemble and serve

  1. Remove the chicken from the pot and place it on the dumplings on a hot platter.

  2. Thicken the remaining broth with milk to make gravy, season to taste, and pour over the chicken before serving.

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 + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the dough, giving the dumplings body as they set.
Baking powder
Releases gas as it heats, helping the dumplings rise and become light.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the dough and keeps the dumplings from toughening.
Milk
Hydrates the flour into a dough and, in the gravy, thickens the broth.
Whole chicken
Provides the meat and, through stewing, the flavourful broth for the dish.

The step that matters

Adding the milk to the dough. Adding milk gradually lets the flour absorb just enough liquid. Too much milk makes a sticky dough that becomes dense and gummy when cooked.

“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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