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Fricassee Chaudfroid

A cold chicken fricassee made with a veal stock sauce, mushrooms, egg yolks, cream, and aspic jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Fricassee Chaudfroid

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Place the trussed chicken in a saucepan with the veal stock and bring to a boil, skimming as necessary.

  2. Once cooked, remove the chicken and set it on a dish.

Make the sauce

  1. In the same saucepan, boil the stock with the mushrooms until reduced.

  2. Remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg yolks and cream.

  3. Season with nutmeg, pepper, and salt, then add lemon juice and pounded sugar.

  4. Heat gently without boiling, then cut the chicken into pieces and arrange in the center of a dish.

Finish and serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the chicken and let it cool and firm up.

  2. Garnish with aspic jelly before serving.

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 + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main meat, which is cooked gently in the stock and then served cold.
Veal stock
Cooks the chicken and, once reduced, forms the flavourful base of the sauce.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and body to the stock as it reduces into the sauce.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce, giving it a smooth, rich texture when heated gently.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Heat gently without boiling. Once egg yolks are stirred in, boiling can curdle them and make the sauce grainy. Gentle heat thickens it smoothly while keeping it creamy.

“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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