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Boiled Chicken, Bread Sauce

A boiled chicken served with a sauce made from bread crumbs, milk, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Boiled Chicken, Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the chicken in salted water until fully cooked.

  2. In a separate pot, heat the milk and butter.

Make the bread sauce

  1. Add the bread crumbs to the milk mixture and stir until thickened.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve the chicken with the bread sauce.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

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; cooking it in salted water fully cooks the meat and seasons it lightly.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and swell, thickening the liquid into a smooth, spoonable sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving it a creamy body and mild sweetness.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the sauce and gives it a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Thickening the bread sauce. Bread crumbs must be stirred into warm milk and given time to absorb it. Adding them to milk that is too hot or stirring too little can leave lumps or a thin, uneven sauce.

“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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