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Boiled Chicken and Rice

Boiled chicken served with rice cooked in chicken gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,769 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Boiled Chicken and Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken and egg gravy

  1. Cook the chicken as in the previous recipe.

  2. Half an hour before serving, remove 1 cup of gravy, season it, and stir in the beaten egg.

Cook the rice

  1. In a pot, boil the rice in 2 quarts of salted water with the celery cut into four pieces for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain the rice and shake it in a colander, then remove the celery pieces.

  3. Put the rice in a saucepan and cover it with the hot chicken gravy.

  4. Set the saucepan in a pan of boiling water over the heat and cook gently for 15 minutes, until the rice absorbs all the gravy. Ensure each grain of rice remains whole.

Serve

  1. When serving, create a border of rice around the chicken.

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. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  2. Rice + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,169 recipes

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

  3. Chicken + celerytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Egg + ricetop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,350 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Chicken + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,991 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Raw rice
Absorbs the gravy and forms the bulk of the border, becoming tender while staying separate.
Chicken gravy
Supplies moisture and flavor, which the rice absorbs as it cooks.
Beaten egg
Stirred into the gravy to thicken it and give it body through gentle setting.
Whole chicken
Provides the main protein and the meat that the rice border surrounds.

The step that matters

Cooking the rice gently in the water bath. Vigorous boiling can break the rice grains and make them mushy. A gentle simmer lets the rice absorb the gravy slowly while the grains stay whole and separate.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, egg, rice):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Garlicfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, egg, rice. 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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