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Chicken Jelly

A chilled gelatin made from simmered chicken, served with wafers or buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chicken Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Combine the pounded chicken and cold water in a covered pot.

  2. Heat the mixture slowly.

  3. Let it simmer until the meat is tender and the liquid is reduced by half.

  4. Strain the mixture through a colander, then through a coarse cloth.

  5. Season the strained liquid with salt and pepper.

  6. Return the seasoned liquid to the heat and simmer for 5 more minutes.

  7. Skim off any fat when the liquid is cool.

Serve

  1. Serve the jelly cold with unleavened wafers.

  2. Make sandwiches with the jelly between buttered bread slices.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

  3. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

What each ingredient does

Raw chicken
Its protein and collagen dissolve into the water, giving the liquid body and a jelly-like set when cooled.
Cold water
Extracts flavor and gelatin from the chicken slowly, producing a clear liquid as it reduces.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the buttered bread slices that hold the jelly.

The step that matters

Simmer until the liquid is reduced by half. Gentle simmering draws gelatin and flavor from the meat without clouding the liquid. Boiling hard makes the stock cloudy and can break down the gel, so it may not set firmly.

“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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