Skip to main content
Main

Fricassee of Chickens

A stew of chicken, gizzard, and liver simmered in a sauce of butter, flour, onions, cream, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Fricassee of Chickens

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Place the chicken pieces, gizzard, and liver in a stewpan and cover with warm water.

  2. Add salt, pepper, cloves, and mace; boil until tender.

  3. Remove the chicken and strain the broth.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter in a pan, add flour, and stir into the broth with finely chopped onions.

  2. Return the broth to the heat with the chicken and simmer for 20 minutes, skimming as needed.

  3. In a bowl, mix cream with egg yolks.

  4. Rapidly stir the cream mixture into the hot broth, ensuring it does not boil.

Serve

  1. Serve the chicken on a dish and pour the sauce over it.

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 + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Chicken
Provides the main body of the dish, cooked gently in water until tender.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the broth so the sauce becomes body-rich and coats the chicken.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce as they gently set with the hot broth.

The step that matters

Adding the cream mixture to the broth. Egg yolks scramble if the broth boils. Stirring the cream mixture in quickly and keeping the sauce below a boil lets the yolks thicken it smoothly instead of curdling.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, liver, pepper, clove, butter, flour, onion):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, liver, pepper, clove, butter, flour, onion. 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.

More chicken fricassee recipes

with Mushrooms 6White 6Cold 4with Tomato Sauce 3 See all 369 →

You might also like

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