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Chicken Mexican

Chicken Mexican is a dish of boiled chicken meatballs flavored with onion, garlic, spearmint, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Chicken Mexican

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meatballs

  1. Remove the meat from the chicken bones and chop it very fine with the garlic, one onion, and spearmint.

  2. Mix the chopped ingredients with the remaining ingredients and form into balls about the size of a pigeon's egg.

Cook

  1. Mince the other onion and fry it brown in a saucepan.

  2. Add 2 quarts of boiling water to the saucepan.

  3. Drop the balls in.

  4. Let them boil for 1 hour.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Chicken + garlictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,850 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).

  4. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

  5. Spearmint + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main body of the meatballs and their savory meat flavor.
Egg
Binds the chopped chicken so the meatballs hold their shape while boiling.
Flour
Absorbs moisture and helps the meatballs hold together during cooking.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma as they soften and brown in the broth.

The step that matters

Let them boil for 1 hour. A gentle, steady boil cooks the chicken through while keeping the meatballs intact; a hard boil can break them apart.

Swap the spearmint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, onion, egg, pepper, clove, garlic, flour):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Spearmintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, egg, pepper, clove, garlic, 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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