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Deviled Chicken with Oyster Sauce

Deviled chicken coated in cracker crumbs and fried, served with a thickened oyster sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Deviled Chicken with Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cut the cold boiled chicken into neat pieces, 1.5 inches long and 0.75 inches wide.

  2. Cover the chicken with oil and lemon juice, and refrigerate for 2 hours.

  3. Sprinkle the chicken with pepper, coarse sea salt, and dry mustard.

  4. Dip the chicken pieces in beaten egg and then coat with cracker crumbs.

  5. Set aside for 1 hour or until firm, then fry until light brown.

Make the oyster sauce

  1. Heat the strained oyster liquor to boiling, skim, and season to taste.

  2. Thicken the oyster liquor with butter rubbed in corn starch, stirring constantly.

  3. Boil the sauce, then add cream and a beaten egg.

Serve

  1. Half fill shallow custard cups with the sauce, place a piece of chicken on top, and serve hot.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pepper + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Chicken + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg
Binds the cracker crumb coating to the chicken and enriches the sauce when beaten in.
Cracker crumbs
Form a crisp, browned coating when the chicken is fried.
Corn starch
Thickens the oyster liquor into a smooth sauce as it boils.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the sauce and helps distribute the starch.
Oyster liquor
Provides the main savory, briny flavor of the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a mellow body to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce after adding the egg. Egg proteins set with heat and can curdle or turn grainy if the sauce boils hard or too long after the egg goes in, so keep it at a gentle boil while stirring.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, lemon, pepper, egg, oyster, butter, corn):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, lemon, pepper, egg, oyster, butter, corn. 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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