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To Fricassee Chicken

Chicken pieces browned in bacon fat, then simmered in water to make a fricassee.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,814 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

To Fricassee Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the chicken

  1. Heat the bacon in an iron sauté pan until it renders fat and becomes very hot.

  2. If desired, cook a little onion in the hot fat before adding the chicken for extra flavor.

  3. Dust each piece of chicken with flour and place them in the hot fat to brown on all sides.

Simmer and finish

  1. Once browned, half-fill the pan with hot water and cover it tightly.

  2. Simmer until the chicken is tender.

  3. Remove the chicken and, if the sauce is greasy, add a little flour and cook.

  4. Thin the sauce with hot water to create a rich fricassee.

  5. Before serving, add pepper and salt if needed, as the bacon may provide enough salt.

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

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

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

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

  3. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Flour + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender through slow simmering in liquid.
Flour
Coats the chicken so it browns, and thickens the sauce when cooked in the fat.
Salt bacon
Renders fat for browning the chicken and adds salty, smoky flavor to the sauce.
Hot water
Forms the cooking liquid that turns into a thinned, flavorful sauce.

The step that matters

Brown the chicken in very hot fat before adding water. Dusted pieces need hot fat to form a browned crust, which builds flavor through the Maillard reaction. Adding water too early steams the chicken and leaves the sauce pale and flat.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, flour, pepper. 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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