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Deviled Chicken with Oyster Sauce

Deviled chicken coated in oil, lemon, spices, coated with egg and cracker crumbs, fried, served with oyster 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 ↓

Deviled Chicken with Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cut the cold boiled chicken into neat pieces, 1.5 inches long and 0.75 inches wide.

  2. Cover the chicken with oil and lemon juice, and refrigerate for 2 hours.

  3. Sprinkle the chicken with pepper, coarse sea salt, and a dust of dry mustard.

  4. Dip the chicken pieces in egg and then in cracker crumbs, and set aside for 1 hour until stiff.

  5. Fry the chicken pieces until light brown.

Make the oyster sauce

  1. Heat 1 cup of strained oyster liquor to boiling, skim, and season to taste.

  2. Thicken the oyster liquor with 1 tablespoon of butter rubbed in 1 tablespoon of cornstarch, stirring constantly.

  3. Boil the sauce while stirring, then add 1 tablespoon of cream and a beaten egg.

Serve

  1. Half fill shallow custard cups with the sauce, place a piece of chicken on top, and serve hot.

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

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

  3. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Lemon + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg
Binds the cracker crumb coating to the chicken and enriches the sauce when beaten in.
Cornstarch
Thickens the oyster liquor into a smooth sauce as it boils.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the sauce and helps blend the cornstarch smoothly.
Cracker crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating on the chicken when fried.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the oyster sauce. Cornstarch must be rubbed with butter and stirred constantly as the liquor boils, or it will clump and leave lumps. Starch thickens only when it reaches a boil, so the sauce must stay at a boil long enough to fully set.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, lemon, pepper, egg, oyster, butter, 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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