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Chicken Stew with Dumplings

A chicken stew simmered with onions, carrots, turnips, and butter, finished with dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chicken Stew with Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stew

  1. Place the cut-up chicken in a stewpan with cold water and bring to a boil.

  2. Heat the butter in a frying pan, add the onion, carrot, and turnip, and fry until browned but not burned.

  3. Add a few tablespoons of boiling water to the vegetables, cover, and stew until tender.

  4. Mash the vegetables through a strainer into the saucepan with the chicken.

  5. Simmer gently until the chicken is tender; about 1 hour for a young chicken or 2 hours for an old fowl.

Add the dumplings and serve

  1. About 12 minutes before serving, bring to a brisk boil and drop in the dumplings.

  2. Cover the saucepan and boil rapidly for 10 to 12 minutes.

  3. Remove the dumplings and keep them warm while serving the chicken.

  4. Pour the gravy over the chicken, place the dumplings around the dish, and serve.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main protein and, as it simmers, flavors the broth that becomes the gravy.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and depth as it browns in the butter.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and body to the gravy when mashed into it.
Turnip
Adds earthy flavor and thickens the gravy when mashed through the strainer.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the vegetables brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Frying the vegetables until browned but not burned. Gentle browning builds sweet, roasted flavor through the Maillard reaction, while scorching produces bitter, acrid notes that carry into the gravy.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, onion, carrot, butter, pepper):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, carrot, butter, pepper. 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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