Skip to main content
Main

Jellied Chicken

A chicken dish set in a gelatinous broth, served chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Jellied Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cook the chicken until fully cooked.

  2. Remove the skin and bones.

  3. Season the chicken with salt and pepper, then place it in a mold.

  4. If desired, line the bottom and sides of the mold with sliced hard boiled eggs.

Make the gelatin and set

  1. To the cooking water, add ¼ box of gelatin and the juice of 1 lemon.

  2. Boil the mixture down to ⅔ pint, then pour it over the chicken in the mold.

  3. Let it cool, then slice to serve.

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

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

  2. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Gelatin + lemontop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,215 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-pinene (pine, resin).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Chicken
Forms the main body of the dish and supplies the meat that is set in the gelatin.
Gelatin
Sets the cooking liquid into a firm jelly that holds the chicken together when sliced.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the jelly and cuts its richness.
Hard boiled eggs
Optional lining that adds a contrasting texture and appearance when the mold is sliced.

The step that matters

Boiling the gelatin mixture down. Gelatin must be fully dissolved and the liquid reduced to the stated volume so that it sets firm enough to slice. Too much liquid leaves the jelly soft and loose.

“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 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes