Skip to main content
Main

Maryland Chicken

A chicken hash served over corn cakes made from sweet milk, eggs, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Maryland Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Remove all bones from the boiled chicken and shred the flesh into fine particles.

  2. Season the shredded chicken with salt, pepper, celery seed, and onion if desired, then stew the seasoned chicken thoroughly.

  3. Add butter to the stew to create a rich gravy.

Make the corn cakes

  1. Cut the corn off the cob and mix it with sweet milk, eggs, and flour to form a batter.

  2. Shape the batter into cakes about the size of thick pancakes.

Serve

  1. Place the corn cakes on a large flat dish.

  2. Pour the chicken hash over the corn cakes.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main body of the dish as shredded meat held in a stew.
Butter
Enriches the stew, adding fat and richness to the gravy.
Eggs
Bind the corn batter so the cakes hold their shape.
Flour
Thickens the batter and gives the corn cakes structure.
Sweet milk
Moistens the batter and helps it form a smooth, pourable mixture.

The step that matters

Stew the seasoned chicken thoroughly. Slow, sustained simmering lets the shredded meat become tender and absorb the seasonings, while the flavours blend. Under-stewing leaves the meat tough and the seasoning unevenly distributed.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, celery, butter, milk, egg, flour):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, celery, butter, milk, egg, flour. 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 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes