Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Ragout

A chicken ragout made with lemon, herbs, butter, and a flour‑butter roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,973 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Chicken Ragout

Ingredients

Directions

Braise the chicken

  1. In a kettle, combine chicken, lemon, bay leaf, thyme, pepper, salt, butter, and water.

  2. Cover and cook slowly until the chicken is tender.

Thicken and serve

  1. In a bowl, mix flour and butter, then add a little cold water and stir until smooth.

  2. Strain the cooking liquid from the chicken and thicken it with the flour mixture.

  3. Once smooth and thick, return the chicken to the kettle and cover tightly until served.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Chicken + thymetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Butter and flour 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
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender through slow, covered cooking.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce when cooked with butter and water.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping carry flavour through the sauce.
Lemon
Adds acidity and bright aroma to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture smooth before thickening. Flour clumps if added to hot liquid without first being blended smoothly with butter and cold water. Lumps are hard to remove later, so the mixture should be fully smooth before it goes into the strained liquid.

“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 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes