Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Terrapin

A creamy chicken terrapin with diced chicken, eggs, spices, butter, flour, cream, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Chicken Terrapin

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Place the cream in a double boiler.

  2. Rub the butter and flour together, then add the butter-flour mixture to the cream and stir until the mixture thickens.

  3. Press the hard-boiled yolks through a vegetable press or mash to a smooth paste, then add the yolk paste to the mixture along with mace, cloves, salt, and pepper.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the chicken dice and heat thoroughly.

  2. Add the sherry.

  3. Serve immediately.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Clove + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Cooked chicken
Provides the main body of the dish as the bulk protein.
Hard boiled eggs
Yolks mash into a smooth paste that thickens and enriches the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour, and with flour helps thicken the cream.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a smooth sauce when cooked with the butter.
Cream
Forms the base of the sauce, giving body and richness.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aroma to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the butter-flour mixture into the cream until thickened. Flour must be cooked in fat and liquid long enough to swell and set; adding it lumpy or undercooking it leaves a pasty, grainy sauce. Gentle heat in a double boiler keeps the cream from scorching or curdling.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, egg, clove, flour, butter, cream, pepper):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, egg, clove, flour, butter, cream, 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.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes