Skip to main content
Main

Jellied Chicken

A chilled chicken dish set in gelatin, layered with boiled egg slices and garnished with celery or parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Jellied Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken in as little water as possible until the meat falls from the bones.

  2. Chop the meat finely and season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice or mace.

Layer and set

  1. Layer the bottom of a mold with slices of hard-boiled eggs, then a layer of chopped chicken, and repeat until the mold is nearly full.

  2. Boil down the cooking water with the gelatin or sea-moss farina until about 1½ cups remain.

  3. Season the liquid, strain it, and pour it over the chicken in the mold.

  4. Let it stand overnight or all day in the refrigerator.

  5. Garnish with celery tops or parsley before serving.

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

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

  2. Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Chicken + celerytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatin or sea-moss farina
Sets the cooking liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly around the chicken.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add firm, mild contrast in texture and visual layering inside the mold.
Chicken
Supplies the meat and natural gelatin-rich broth that gives the dish its body.

The step that matters

Boiling down the cooking water with the gelatin. The liquid must reduce to about 1½ cups so it has enough concentration to set firmly when chilled. Too much water leaves a loose, weak jelly that will not hold its shape when unmolded.

Swap the celery

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, lemon, egg, gelatin. 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.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes