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Fricasseed Chicken

A boiled chicken dish flavored with onion, parsley, mace, butter, flour, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Fricasseed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Stuff the chickens as if to boil.

  2. Place them in a pot and add enough water to not quite cover them.

  3. Cook for 2 hours before dinner.

  4. Add chopped onion, parsley, and mace to the pot.

Thicken and finish

  1. In a bowl, rub butter with flour until well combined.

  2. Before serving, beat the egg yolks and stir them in carefully.

  3. Cook for an additional 5 minutes.

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. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Parsley + macetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and enrich it with richness and a smooth texture when stirred in gently.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor and helps bind the flour into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid when combined with butter, giving the sauce body.
Onion
Adds aromatic flavor to the cooking liquid as it simmers with the chicken.

The step that matters

Beat the egg yolks and stir them in carefully. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can scramble if they get too hot or are added to boiling liquid. Tempering and stirring slowly keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, onion, parsley, butter, flour, egg):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, parsley, butter, flour, egg. 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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