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Chicken with Noodles

A dish of boiled chicken pieces served with noodles and a butter‑flour‑milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Chicken with Noodles

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken with salt and pepper until tender.

  2. Remove the chicken, cut it into 2‑inch pieces, and reserve 1 cup of the stock.

Cook the noodles

  1. Boil the noodles in the remaining stock for 10 minutes.

  2. Place the noodles in a dish with the chicken in the center.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Make the sauce by boiling 1 cup of chicken stock, ½ cup of milk, 1 tablespoon of butter, and 1 teaspoon of flour together.

  2. Pour the sauce over the chicken and noodles.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Supplies the main protein, which firms as it cooks and becomes tender when simmered gently.
Noodles
Provide the starchy base of the dish and soak up the stock and sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in hot liquid.
Milk
Adds creaminess and a mild richness to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the sauce a smooth, rich mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Making the sauce. Flour thickens the sauce only as its starch swells in hot liquid, so the sauce must boil long enough for the flour to cook fully and turn smooth rather than pasty.

“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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