Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Terrapin

A creamy chicken and sweetbread dish with butter, flour, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chicken Terrapin

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. Chop the cooked chicken and parboiled sweetbread finely.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the hot cream, butter, and flour to make a sauce.

Combine and heat

  1. Add the chicken and sweetbread to the sauce, seasoning with salt and pepper.

  2. Heat the mixture over hot water or in a double boiler for 15 minutes.

  3. Just before serving, stir in the beaten egg yolks and sherry wine.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

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

  4. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Chicken + sherrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together891 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

Cooked chicken
Provides the main body of the dish as finely chopped meat.
Sweetbread
Adds a tender, delicate texture to the finely chopped meat mixture.
Heavy cream
Forms the base of the sauce, adding richness and a smooth, silky body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping build the sauce with the flour.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the cream and butter into a sauce that holds the chicken together.
Egg yolks
Enrich and slightly thicken the sauce when stirred in near the end.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks just before serving. Egg yolks thicken when heated and can scramble or curdle if they get too hot or are cooked too long. Adding them at the end, over gentle heat, keeps the sauce smooth and creamy.

“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.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes