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Chicken Stew

A simple stew of chicken simmered with water, salt, pepper, bay leaf, parsley, and optional onion, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Chicken Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Place the dressed and cut-up fowl in a stew pan and cover with boiling water.

  2. Cook gently until tender, about 1 hour.

  3. After 1 hour, add salt, pepper, bay leaf, parsley, and onion if desired.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix flour with cold water and stir into the stew to thicken the stock.

  2. Add curry to the sauce for curried chicken.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Onion + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long gentle simmering.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a sauce when mixed with cold water and stirred in.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour and cold water mixture. Flour must be mixed smoothly with cold water before it goes into the hot stock, because adding it dry or undiluted causes lumps. Stirring it in gives an even, thickened sauce.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, parsley, flour, chicken):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, parsley, flour, chicken. 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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