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Chicken Jelly

Chicken jelly is a chilled gelatinized chicken broth served cold, often sliced or used in sandwiches.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chicken Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Cook the chicken in enough water to cover it slightly.

  2. Let it stew gently until the meat falls from the bones and the broth reduces to about 1 pint.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper to taste.

  4. Strain and press the broth through a colander and then a coarse cloth.

  5. Cook the strained broth over the fire for a few more minutes.

Set and serve

  1. Pour it into an earthen dish to harden and refrigerate until cold.

  2. Serve cold in slices, or make sandwiches with thinly sliced bread spread with butter.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

  3. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  5. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

What each ingredient does

1 whole chicken
Provides the meat and collagen-rich bones that give the broth body and flavor.
Bread
Forms the base for sandwiches served with the set aspic.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the bread when serving sandwiches.

The step that matters

Reducing the broth to about 1 pint. Too much water left in the broth leaves a weak gel that will not set firmly. Stewing gently and then reducing concentrates the gelatin from the bones, so the cooled broth holds its shape.

“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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