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Fricasseed Chicken

Fricassee chicken is a boiled chicken cooked with onion, parsley, mace, butter, flour, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 865 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Fricasseed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the onion, parsley, and mace.

  2. Stuff the chicken as if to boil and place it in a pot.

  3. Add enough water to almost cover the chicken.

Cook

  1. Cook for two hours before dinner.

  2. Rub the butter with flour and stir it into the pot.

  3. Before serving, beat the egg yolks and stir them in carefully.

  4. Cook for an additional four to five minutes.

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. Parsley + walnuttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together865 recipes

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

  2. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

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

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Flour
Mixed with butter to thicken the cooking liquid into a sauce.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce when gently stirred in near the end.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce and carries flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat; if the sauce is too hot or boils after they go in, they can scramble and turn grainy. Stir them in carefully and keep the heat low.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, onion, parsley, walnut, butter, flour, egg):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, parsley, walnut, butter, flour, egg. 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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