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Stewed Chicken

A whole chicken stewed with salt, pepper, herbs, butter, and water, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Stewed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the chicken into pieces at the joints and place in a stew pan.

  2. Add salt, pepper, parsley, thyme, water, and butter.

Stew and finish

  1. Stew for 1.5 hours.

  2. Remove the chicken from the pan.

  3. If there is no gravy, add another tablespoon of butter, some water, and flour.

  4. Boil for a few minutes until slightly thickened.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 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

Whole chicken
Provides the meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle stewing in liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the liquid, helping flavor the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy when it is boiled.

The step that matters

Boil the gravy until slightly thickened. Flour only thickens liquid once it reaches a boil and is kept there briefly, so the gravy stays thin if it is not boiled enough.

Swap the thyme

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

  1. Thymethe original
  2. Marjoramfits about as well
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, parsley, butter, flour. 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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