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Chicken with Chestnut Puree and Vegetables

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chestnut and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chicken with Chestnut Puree and Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut cold roast chicken into joints and remove the bones.

  2. Fill the bone cavities with a stiff puree of chestnuts moistened with cream and grated lemon rind.

  3. Dip the stuffed chicken joints in aspic jelly and allow to set.

  4. Decorate with piping of Ravigote butter.

  5. Serve on a bed of crisp lettuce leaves with a vegetable medley and tartar sauce in the center.

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. Chestnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Chestnut + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together381 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, chestnut, cream, butter, lettuce, sauce):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, chestnut, cream, butter, lettuce, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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