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Hot Chicken Sandwich

A sandwich of toasted bread filled with cooked chicken and white sauce, seasoned with salt and optional parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Hot Chicken Sandwich

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Heat the white sauce or thickened chicken stock.

  2. Add the chicken slices and heat through.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt, celery salt, and chopped parsley if desired.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place the chicken and sauce between two slices of toast.

  2. Garnish with parsley and olives.

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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

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

  3. Chicken + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,888 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid hexyl ester (sweet, green).

  4. Celery + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Chicken + celerytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked chicken
Provides the main protein and bulk of the sandwich filling.
White sauce
Adds moisture and creamy richness that keeps the chicken from drying out.
Toast
Gives the sandwich a crisp, sturdy structure to hold the filling.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, sauce, parsley, olive):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, sauce, parsley, olive. 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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