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Fricassee De Poulet

A French chicken stew with butter, vegetables, stock, flour, egg yolks, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Fricassee De Poulet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Wash the chicken pieces in cold water to remove any blood or small vessels.

  2. In a stewpan, melt 1 ounce of butter and lightly brown the carrot, onion, celery, mace, parsley, cloves, salt, and peppercorns.

  3. Add the chicken pieces to the pan and pour in the stock or boiling water.

  4. Cover and stew gently for 45 minutes.

  5. Skim off any fat, strain the vegetables, and set the chicken aside.

Make the sauce

  1. In another pan, melt 2 ounces of butter and gradually whisk in the flour without letting it color.

  2. Remove from heat and slowly add the broth, stirring until smooth.

  3. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with ½ ounce of butter and cream, then gradually mix into the sauce.

  4. Stir for about 5 minutes until well combined.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Supplies the meat that is gently cooked until tender in the stock.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor through the sauce base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the sauce as their proteins set with gentle heat.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks to the sauce. Egg yolks thicken by setting when heated, so the sauce should be off the heat or only gently warm while the yolks are added slowly and stirred in. Too much heat scrambles the yolks into grainy bits.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, carrot, onion, celery, parsley, clove. 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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