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Fricassee Op Chicken

A stew of chicken joints simmered with onions, parsley, lemon, butter, water, cream, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Fricassee Op Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Braise the chicken

  1. Scald and skin the chicken joints.

  2. Place the chicken in a stewpan with onions, parsley, salt, pepper, lemon juice, butter, and water.

  3. Cover and stew for 1 hour over low heat.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Strain the gravy into a bowl.

  2. Gradually beat in the cream and egg yolks into the gravy.

  3. Heat the gravy gently, ensuring it does not boil.

  4. Pour the gravy over the fricassee 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Enriches and thickens the cream gravy, giving it a smooth, velvety body when heated gently.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the gravy, softening its flavour and texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the stewed chicken and its cooking liquid.
Onions
Release sweetness and aroma into the stewing liquid, flavouring the gravy.

The step that matters

Heat the gravy gently, ensuring it does not boil. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat. If the gravy boils, the proteins in the yolks scramble, leaving the sauce grainy and curdled instead of smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, parsley, pepper, lemon, butter, cream, egg):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, parsley, pepper, lemon, butter, cream, egg. 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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