Name: Chicken Wiggle
Ingredients: 2 cups picked chicken; 1 cup small French peas; salt to taste; a pinch of cayenne; buttered toast

Why it works: Chicken and peas are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,528 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Chicken Wiggle

Ingredients

Directions

Make a rich drawn butter gravy in a chafing dish.
Mix in the picked chicken and small French peas.
Season with salt and cayenne.
Serve on squares of buttered toast.

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.

Chicken + peastop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,528 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Picked chicken: Forms the main body of the dish and supplies its substance and protein.
Small french peas: Add sweetness, color and a tender bite to the creamy gravy.

“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.