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Minced Chicken on Toast

A dish of minced chicken simmered with onion juice, celery, nutmeg, and cream sauce, served on buttered toast and garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Minced Chicken on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. In a saucepan, combine minced chicken, onion juice, chopped celery, nutmeg, and cream sauce.

  2. Simmer on low heat for 30 minutes.

  3. Season to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve the mixture on slices of buttered toast.

  2. Garnish with chopped parsley.

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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Celery + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,331 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold chicken
Provides the main body and protein of the filling, which softens as it simmers.
Cream sauce
Adds moisture and creaminess so the minced chicken forms a cohesive, spoonable filling.
Onion juice
Adds savory aromatic flavor to the filling.

The step that matters

Simmering the filling on low heat. Keeping the heat low and the simmer gentle stops the cream sauce from scorching or breaking, which would leave the filling grainy or stuck to the pan.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, onion, celery, cream, sauce, parsley):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, celery, cream, sauce, parsley. 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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