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Hot Chicken Salad

A warm chicken salad with a creamy sauce made from butter, flour, milk, cream, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Hot Chicken Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Soak the diced chicken or turkey in salad oil for 1 hour.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat and add the onion juice.

  2. Stir in the flour until blended, then gradually add the milk.

  3. Cook until thick and smooth, then add the chicken and any remaining oil.

  4. Heat until scalding hot, season with celery salt, coarse sea salt, and white pepper.

  5. Stir in the cream and serve immediately, with or without toast.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  4. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken or turkey
Provides the main protein and bulk of the dish.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour during the initial melt.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, creamy sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a silkier texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually adding the milk to the roux. Adding liquid slowly while stirring keeps the flour dispersed, so the sauce cooks smooth instead of forming lumps. Cooking until thick then removes the raw flour taste.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, butter, flour, milk, cream, onion, celery):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, flour, milk, cream, onion, celery. 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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