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Chicken in Peas

A chicken stew cooked with peas, butter, parsley, onion, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper 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 in Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the chicken into neat joints and place them in a saucepan.

  2. Add the peas, ¼ cup of butter, parsley, salt, pepper, onion, and gravy.

  3. Simmer gently until the liquid is mostly evaporated.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix the remaining butter with the flour.

  2. Add the mixture to the peas, which should be boiling.

  3. Shake the saucepan until the peas are nicely thickened.

  4. Serve the chicken and peas piled high on a dish.

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

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

  2. Chicken + oniontop 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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

Chicken
Forms the main body of the dish and provides the savoury meat.
Peas
Provide the bulk and sweet, fresh flavour of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour, and with flour helps thicken the liquid.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid when mixed with butter and stirred into the boiling peas.
Gravy
Supplies the cooking liquid and savoury flavour that the peas absorb while simmering.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture to the boiling peas. Flour thickens only when heated in liquid long enough to swell its starch. Adding it to peas that are not boiling, or stirring poorly, can leave lumps or a thin sauce.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Black-eyed peafits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

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