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Brown Fricassee of Chicken

A brown chicken fricassee made with salt pork, allspice, cloves, and browned flour thickening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 7,874 recipes mention both. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Brown Fricassee of Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the jointed chicken in salted cold water for 30 minutes.

  2. Fry the salt pork strips in good dripping until crispy, then remove the pork strips from the pan.

  3. In the same fat, fry the chicken until browned, along with the sliced onion.

  4. Chop the fried pork strips.

Stew

  1. Add the chopped pork to a saucepan with the onion and chicken.

  2. Sprinkle the mixed allspice and cloves over the mixture.

  3. Add enough cold water to cover the ingredients.

  4. Cover the saucepan with a tight lid.

  5. Stew gently for at least 1 hour, or until the chicken is tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Arrange the chicken on a hot dish.

  2. Strain the gravy from the saucepan.

  3. Season the gravy with pepper, salt, and parsley.

  4. Thicken the gravy with browned flour.

  5. Bring the gravy to a boil.

  6. Pour the boiling gravy over the chicken.

  7. Cover the dish and let it sit for 5 minutes before serving.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Chicken + porktop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together5,417 recipes

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

  4. Allspice + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow, gentle stewing.
Salt pork
Renders fat and flavour into the dripping and the gravy as it fries and stews.
Onion
Softens during frying and stewing, adding sweetness and savoury depth to the gravy.
Browned flour
Thickens the strained gravy so it coats the chicken.
Mixed allspice
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the stewing liquid.
Ground cloves
Adds strong, aromatic spice flavour to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Stew gently for at least 1 hour. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer under a tight lid lets collagen in the chicken break down slowly, so the meat becomes tender without drying out or toughening. A hard boil would toughen the muscle fibres and reduce the liquid too quickly.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pork, allspice, clove, pepper, parsley, flour):

  1. Carrotbetter flavor fit
  2. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  3. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pork, allspice, clove, pepper, parsley, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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