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Chicken with Rice

A chicken cooked with rice in a sauce made from butter, eggs, flour, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Chicken with Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Place the hen in a bag with the rice.

  2. Submerge in a pot of cold water and boil for 2 hours.

  3. Carefully remove the hen from the bag and place it on a dish.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Make the sauce by mixing butter and hard boiled eggs, adding some of the boiling water, and whisking in flour and salt.

  2. Pour the sauce over the chicken and serve hot.

  3. Save the boiling water to make soup the next day.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

  4. Rice + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Hen
Provides the main protein and body of the dish, cooked gently until tender.
Rice
Cooks in the bag alongside the hen, absorbing flavour and adding starchy bulk.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce, giving it a smooth, mellow texture.
Hard boiled eggs
Mashed into the sauce, they thicken it and add a rich, creamy body.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the chicken rather than running off.

The step that matters

Whisking flour into the sauce. Flour clumps if added to hot liquid without being well mixed with the butter and eggs first. Whisking it in thoroughly gives a smooth sauce that thickens evenly.

“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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