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Broiled Chicken on Toast

Broiled chicken served on toast with a cream gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Broiled Chicken on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Broil the chicken until thoroughly cooked.

  2. Remove the chicken from the broiler.

  3. Place the chicken in a square tin or dripping pan.

  4. Butter the chicken well.

  5. Season the chicken with salt and pepper.

  6. Bake the chicken in the oven for a few minutes.

Prepare the toast

  1. Moisten the slices of bread.

  2. Butter the slices of bread.

  3. Lay the bread on a platter.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Add part of the gravy from the pan to the cream or milk.

  2. Thicken the mixture with a little flour.

  3. Pour the gravy over the chicken.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

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

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

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
Provides the main cooked meat that the dish is built around.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the chicken and bread brown and taste savoury.
Bread
Forms the base that soaks up the moistened, buttered slices and the gravy.
Cream or milk
Adds moisture and body to the pan gravy, making it smoother and richer.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated with the gravy.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy with flour. Flour thickens liquid only when its starch is heated in the liquid, so the mixture must be stirred and heated enough to swell the starch. Too little heat leaves the gravy thin, and flour dropped in unmixed forms lumps.

“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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