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Cream Chicken

Cream Chicken is a chicken dish cooked in a cream sauce with mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,172 recipes. Both carry 1-butyl acetate, which smells fruity, banana. The science ↓

Cream Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken and stock

  1. Boil the chicken until tender, then cut it into dice.

  2. Skim the stock, which should be about 1 quart, and let it cool, then strain it.

Make the cream sauce

  1. Heat the strained stock and add the cream while hot.

  2. Mix the melted butter with the flour, then add it to the creamed stock to make a cream sauce.

Combine and serve

  1. Stir the sauce into the chicken and add the mushrooms.

  2. Season the sauce to taste and serve in patty shells or over toast.

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 + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cream + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a smooth cream sauce.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness to the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture to the hot stock. Flour thickens sauces only when its starch is dispersed and heated. Lumps form if the flour is not blended smoothly with the butter first, so stir steadily as the sauce thickens.

“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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