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Chicken Stew

A stew of dressed chicken cooked slowly in water, thickened with flour, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,459 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Chicken Stew

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Cut up and wash the fowl.

  2. Put the fowl into a kettle and cover with boiling water.

  3. Cook slowly until tender, adding salt when half cooked.

  4. Remove the meat.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Thicken the stock with flour mixed to a smooth paste with cold water, using ½ cup of flour for every quart of liquid.

  2. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

  3. Pour the sauce over the meat. Serve.

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. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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 meat, which becomes tender through slow simmering in water.
Flour
Thickens the stock as its starch swells with heat, giving the sauce body.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour into a smooth paste with cold water. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid dry. Starch granules must be separated in cold water first so they can swell evenly and thicken the stock without lumps.

“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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