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Chicken with White Sauce

Chicken with white sauce is a boiled chicken served with a sauce made from butter, flour, chicken stock, egg yolks, cream, and optional lemon and mushrooms.

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

Chicken with White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Boil the whole chicken in lukewarm water with salt, pepper, cloves, onion, and kitchen bouquet.

  2. Let it simmer slowly until tender.

  3. Cut the chicken into pieces to serve.

Make the white sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and add the flour.

  2. Pour in the water used to cook the chicken.

  3. Mix in the egg yolks with the cream and add to the sauce.

  4. Add lemon juice and mushrooms if desired, then pour the sauce over the chicken.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries flavour into the sauce base.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the sauce by swelling with the hot liquid to give body.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce, giving it a smooth, creamy texture.
Cream
Adds fat and moisture, making the sauce silkier and milder.
Water from cooking chicken
Serves as the flavourful liquid that becomes the body of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks and cream. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can scramble if the sauce is too hot. Temper them with some hot liquid first and keep the heat low so the sauce stays smooth.

Flavor stand-ins for the clove

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

  1. Garlicbetter flavor fit
  2. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  3. Nutmegbetter flavor fit
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, onion, butter, flour, egg, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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