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Dessert

Chicken Livers a LA Chantecler

A casserole of chicken livers with chestnuts, stock, butter, and fried apples.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Chestnut and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 448 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Chicken Livers a LA Chantecler

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shell and boil the chestnuts until tender but not crumbling.

  2. Drain the chicken livers and fry them brown in olive oil.

Assemble and cook

  1. Place the livers in a casserole with enough chicken stock to prevent burning.

  2. Dip the chestnuts in olive oil and place them over the chicken livers. Add dabs of butter on top.

  3. Cook the casserole for 15 to 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve very hot with fried apples.

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. Chestnut + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together448 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  3. Chestnut + appletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

  4. Olive + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,565 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  5. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken livers
Frying browns them, giving the dish its savoury, rich flavour and tender interior.
Big italian chestnuts
Their starch softens during boiling and gives the dish a mild, sweet, floury body.
Chicken stock
Adds liquid in the casserole so the livers do not dry out or burn.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour across the chestnuts and livers as they cook.
Olive oil
Carries heat for frying and coats the chestnuts so they brown lightly.

The step that matters

Frying the chicken livers brown. Browning relies on the Maillard reaction, which needs a hot, dry pan surface. Livers that are not well drained or are crowded in the pan will steam and go grey, losing flavour.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chestnut, chicken, liver, olive, butter):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Lemonfits about as well
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chestnut, chicken, liver, olive, butter. 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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