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Creamed Chicken

Creamed Chicken is a dish of cooked chicken in a white sauce seasoned with celery salt, onion juice, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Creamed Chicken

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Creamed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, prepare the white sauce.

  2. Add celery salt and onion juice to the sauce.

Combine and serve

  1. Stir in the chicken and season with salt and pepper if needed.

  2. Warm the mixture through.

  3. Remove from heat and add lemon juice.

  4. Serve on toast, in a potato border, or in pastry cases.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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 and bulk of the creamed dish.
White sauce
Forms the creamy base that binds the chicken and gives moisture.
Lemon juice
Adds a bright acidity that lifts the rich, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Remove from heat and add lemon juice. Acid added to a hot, dairy-based sauce can cause curdling or separation, so adding it off the heat keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, sauce, celery, pepper, lemon):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, sauce, celery, pepper, lemon. 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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