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Chicken Fricassee

Chicken Fricassee is a braised chicken dish served with a creamy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Chicken Fricassee

Ingredients

Directions

Make the chicken

  1. Brown the chicken pieces in butter over medium heat without allowing them to color too much.

  2. Cover the chicken with boiling water and simmer until tender, about 40 minutes for a year-old chicken.

  3. Reduce the stock to 1 pint.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pan, melt 1 tablespoon of butter and whisk in 2 tablespoons of flour to make a roux.

  2. Season the roux with celery salt, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

  3. Gradually add 1 cup of hot cream to the roux, stirring constantly.

  4. Slowly pour the sauce over the well-beaten egg, stirring well.

Serve

  1. Arrange the chicken pieces on a hot platter and pour the sauce over them.

  2. Garnish with toast points and parsley in the center.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main protein and flavor, and its gelatin-rich stock body enriches the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor, and helps brown the chicken pieces.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as a roux with the butter.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Egg
Enriches and thickens the sauce when stirred in gently.

The step that matters

Pouring the sauce over the beaten egg. Adding the hot sauce to the egg slowly while stirring constantly tempers it, so the egg warms gradually and thickens smoothly instead of scrambling into lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, sauce, flour, celery, pepper, cream. 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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