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Marseilles Boiled Chicken Pudding

A boiled pudding made with chopped chicken, butter, stock, cream, egg yolk, nuts, and wrapped in biscuit dough or pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and biscuit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 388 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Marseilles Boiled Chicken Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Mix the chopped chicken with the drawn butter.

  2. Add stock or gravy and cream.

  3. Thicken to a starch-like consistency.

  4. Incorporate the egg yolk and nuts until creamy and soft.

  5. Chill the mixture until it stiffens.

Assemble and cook

  1. Line a pudding mold with biscuit dough or pie crust.

  2. Fill the mold with the chicken mixture and cover with crust.

  3. Fit on the lid and boil for 1 hour or steam for 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Turn out onto a hot dish and serve with egg sauce or gravy.

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. Almond + biscuittop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together388 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Cream + biscuittop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold chicken
Forms the bulk of the pudding and gives it its main body and flavour.
Drawn butter
Adds richness and a soft, moist texture to the chicken filling.
Stock or gravy
Moistens the mixture and helps it thicken into a spreadable consistency.
Egg yolk
Binds the filling and helps it set to a creamy, sliceable texture when cooked.
Pounded almonds or pine nuts
Add body and a subtle nutty flavour that enriches the filling.

The step that matters

Chilling the filling until it stiffens. Chilling firms the fat in the butter and the thickened mixture so it holds its shape when filled into the crust and cooked, instead of collapsing or leaking during boiling or steaming.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Cashew nutfits less well
  4. Macadamia nutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, cream, egg, biscuit. 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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