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Chicken Jelly

A chilled gelatinous dish made from simmered chicken, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Chicken and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,958 recipes. Both carry piperonal, which smells bitter, coconut. The science ↓

Chicken Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Pound the chicken with a mallet to break all the bones.

  2. Place the chicken and bones in a saucepan and add the cold water.

  3. Cover and simmer slowly until the meat is reduced to shreds and the liquid is reduced by half.

  4. Remove from heat, strain, and press through a colander and then a coarse cloth.

  5. Return the thick liquid to the heat, add salt and pepper, and simmer for 5 more minutes.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into a dish and skim off any fat when cool.

  2. Refrigerate until set into a jelly.

  3. Serve cold, sliced, with toast or between thin slices of buttered bread.

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 + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

What each ingredient does

Spring chicken
Breaks down into shreds and releases gelatin that sets the liquid into a jelly.
Cold water
Extracts flavor and gelatin from the chicken and bones as it simmers down.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly until the liquid is reduced by half. Gentle simmering draws gelatin and flavor from the bones without clouding the liquid. Boiling hard emulsifies fat into it and makes the aspic cloudy and greasy, so it may not set cleanly.

“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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