Skip to main content
Main

Mould of Chicken and Rice

A molded dish of boiled rice and minced chicken, bound with egg and seasoned, baked in a pot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Mould of Chicken and Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Boil the rice in the stock seasoned with pepper, salt, onion juice, and celery for 20 minutes.

  2. Drain the rice and beat in the raw egg while hot. Let it cool and stiffen.

Mould and fill

  1. Grease a mold and coat it with fine bread crumbs.

  2. Line the mold with the rice, making it nearly an inch thick and hollowing it out.

  3. Fill the hollow with minced chicken, seasoned well, and cover with a layer of rice.

Steam and serve

  1. Cover the mold with a tightly fitting lid and place it in a pot of hot water.

  2. Cook for 1 hour, then turn out onto a hot platter and serve with curry or tomato sauce.

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

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

  2. Rice + chickentop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Rice + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,169 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

Boiled rice
Forms the main body of the mould and sets firm as it cools.
Raw egg
Binds the rice so it holds its shape when turned out.
Chicken or other stock
Cooks the rice and seasons it through as it absorbs the liquid.
Cold cooked chicken
Provides the savoury filling inside the rice shell.
Fine bread crumbs
Coat the mould so the rice releases cleanly after cooking.

The step that matters

Beat the egg into the hot rice, then let it cool and stiffen. The egg proteins set when heated, so the rice binds into a firm shell. Beating it in while the rice is hot helps it mix evenly, and cooling lets the mixture firm enough to line the mould and hold its shape when turned out.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, chicken, pepper, celery, egg, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, chicken, pepper, celery, egg, bread. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes