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Cream of Chicken

A creamy chicken sauce made with butter, milk, flour, and seasonings, served over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Cream of Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the milk, reserving a little to blend the flour.

  3. When the milk boils, stir in the blended flour until smooth.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the chicken and stir to prevent scorching until heated through.

  2. Add the seasonings and chopped parsley, then serve on 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and adds richness and flavor as it melts into the milk.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the flour thickens.
Cold cooked chicken
Provides the main protein and body of the dish, heated through in the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the blended flour into the boiling milk until smooth. Flour added to hot liquid without being blended smooth first can form lumps, because the starch clumps before it disperses. Stirring steadily while the milk boils helps the starch hydrate evenly and thicken into a smooth sauce.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

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