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Chicken a LA Maryland

A chicken soup with tomatoes, stock, and vegetables, served with toast points or fried bread baskets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Chicken a LA Maryland

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the chicken

  1. Clean the chicken and remove the head and legs.

  2. Place the chicken in a pot of warm water to cover it.

  3. Add the onion, carrot, turnip, bay leaf, cloves, peppercorns, and celery.

  4. Cook slowly until the chicken is tender, then remove the meat from the bones.

Make the sauce

  1. Cut the chicken into two-inch pieces.

  2. Cook the stock down to one cup.

  3. In a saucepan, melt the butter and add the flour, stirring until smooth.

  4. Slowly stir in the cup of stock, then add the strained tomatoes and chicken.

  5. Cook for ten minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve surrounded by toast points or in fried bread baskets.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the meat that is cooked tender and then served in the sauce.
Butter
Melted with flour to form a roux that thickens the sauce and adds richness.
Flour
Combined with melted butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce.
Chicken stock
Reduced to concentrate its flavour, then forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Tomatoes
Strained and added to the sauce, contributing acidity, colour and flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring the roux smooth before adding the stock. Flour must be cooked evenly into the melted butter and stock added gradually; adding liquid too fast or unevenly leaves lumps, so the sauce will not thicken smoothly.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, butter, flour):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, butter, 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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