Skip to main content
Drink

Cream Chicken with Mushrooms

Cream chicken with mushrooms is a dish of boiled chicken in a cream sauce with mushrooms, red pepper, cornstarch, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chicken and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,172 recipes. Both carry 1-butyl acetate, which smells fruity, banana. The science ↓

Cream Chicken with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the whole chicken and cut the meat into large squares.

  2. Boil the mushrooms until tender.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a saucepan, combine the cream, red pepper, and cornstarch.

  2. Add the chicken and drained mushrooms to the saucepan.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and add a little butter.

  4. Heat through and serve.

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 + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Forms the body of the sauce and gives the dish its rich, smooth texture.
Cornstarch
Thickens the cream as it heats, helping the sauce cling to the chicken and mushrooms.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and a soft, tender texture to the dish.
Whole chicken
Provides the main protein, cut into large pieces that hold their shape in the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the cornstarch to the cream before heating. Cornstarch needs heat to thicken, and it clumps if dropped in unmixed. Combining it with the cream first and heating gently helps the sauce turn smooth rather than lumpy.

“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

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes