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Chicken Jelly

A gelatinized chicken broth made with chicken, salt, pepper, lemon juice, egg, and water, served chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Clean and disjoint the chicken, removing all fat and cutting the meat into small pieces.

  2. Break the bones and lay the feet in boiling water; remove the skin and nails.

  3. Put the meat, bones, and feet into a saucepan, cover with cold water, and heat gradually until the meat is tender.

Make the aspic

  1. Strain the mixture and, when cold, remove the fat.

  2. Add salt, pepper, lemon juice, and the shell and white of the egg.

  3. Heat on the stove, stirring until hot, then boil for five minutes.

  4. Skim and pour through a fine cloth into a mold.

  5. Set aside to cool, then turn out and garnish.

  6. Serve with thin slices of bread and butter.

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. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Chicken + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,991 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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 and bones that release gelatin and flavor into the liquid, setting it into aspic.
Egg white and shell
Its proteins coagulate as they heat, trapping particles and clarifying the liquid.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the rich chicken broth.

The step that matters

Heating with the egg white. Stir gently while the liquid heats so the egg white can rise and gather impurities, then boil briefly. Letting it boil hard too early can cloud the aspic and break up the clarifying crust.

“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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