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Chicken in Aspic

A chicken dish set in a gelatinous stock made from the chicken's own broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Chicken in Aspic

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Singe, draw, clean, and cut the chicken into pieces.

  2. Season with salt and pepper, and let it stand for 2 hours.

Make the stock

  1. Place the chicken in a kettle and add onion, carrot, celery, parsley, bay leaf, and cloves.

  2. Cover with boiling water and cook slowly until the chicken is very tender.

  3. Remove the chicken, skin it, and cut the meat into medium-sized pieces.

  4. Return the bones and skin to the kettle and cook slowly until the stock is reduced by half.

  5. Strain the stock, remove the fat, and season to taste.

Set in a mold

  1. Mix the stock with the chicken and add the sliced hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Fill a mold with the mixture and place it in a cold area to firm up.

  3. If the stock does not jell in summer, add ¼ cup gelatin dissolved in a little water.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked 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 meat that is set in the aspic, and its bones and skin add body to the stock.
Gelatin
Sets the stock into a firm jelly when it does not jell on its own.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add firm, sliced texture and contrast to the jellied chicken.

The step that matters

Reducing the stock by half. Cooking the bones and skin slowly concentrates the flavor and natural gelatin in the stock. If it is not reduced enough, the stock may stay too thin to set firmly in the mold.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, onion, carrot, celery, parsley, 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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