Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Fricassee

A chicken dish simmered in broth and milk, browned in dripping, finished with a white sauce and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Chicken Fricassee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and simmer

  1. Clean the chicken and cut it into serving pieces.

  2. Cover with boiling water, add salt and pepper, and simmer until tender.

  3. Remove large bones and cook them again in the water.

Brown and serve

  1. Dredge the meat with flour and brown in hot dripping.

  2. Place on toast on a hot dish.

  3. Strain the broth and remove the fat.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine chicken broth and milk.

  2. Thicken with flour cooked in butter, as for white sauce.

  3. Season with more salt, pepper, celery salt, and lemon juice if needed.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Chicken
Provides the meat that is simmered until tender and then browned.
Flour
Coats the meat for browning and, cooked in butter, thickens the sauce.
Butter
Fat cooked with flour to form the roux that thickens the sauce.
Milk
Adds richness and body to the sauce along with the broth.
Chicken broth
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding savoury flavour.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, flour, milk, butter, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, flour, milk, butter, lemon. 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.

More chicken fricassee recipes

with Mushrooms 6White 6Cold 4with Tomato Sauce 3 See all 369 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes