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Chicken Steamed

A whole chicken is steamed and served with a sauce of cream, flour, and seasonings, garnished with parsley, eggs, celery, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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 ↓

Chicken Steamed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Rub the chicken inside with black pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Wrap the chicken in a white cloth and place it in a steamer near the water.

Steam and make the sauce

  1. Cover and steam for 1.5 hours.

  2. For the sauce, boil 1 pint of liquid from the kettle without fat.

  3. Add cayenne pepper and coarse sea salt to the liquid.

  4. Stir 3 tablespoons of flour into 1 cup of cream until smooth, then mix with the gravy.

  5. Add celery salt or nutmeg and lemon juice to taste.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish with curled parsley, hard-boiled eggs, celery, and slices of lemon.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Steam cooking leaves the meat moist and tender while the seasoning flavors it from inside.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the cream.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce, softening its flavor and texture.
Liquid from boiling chicken
Serves as the savory base of the gravy, carrying the chicken flavor into the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the cream. Flour clumps if added dry or unevenly. Mixing it smoothly into the cream first lets it hydrate evenly, so the sauce thickens without lumps when combined with the hot liquid.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, flour, cream, lemon, 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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