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Very Nice Scallops From Cold Chicken

Scallop-shaped chicken meatballs baked with cream, nutmeg, pepper, sea salt, bread crumbs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Very Nice Scallops From Cold Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Bone the cold chicken meat and mince it small.

Make the filling

  1. Heat the minced chicken in a little cream and season with nutmeg, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  2. Place the mixture into scallop shells.

Bake and serve

  1. Fill the shells with bread crumbs and top with small bits of butter.

  2. Brown the scallops in the oven.

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. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Chicken + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold chicken meat
Forms the main body of the filling once minced and heated.
Cream
Adds moisture so the minced chicken stays tender rather than dry.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp topping that browns in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat that helps the crumbs brown and gives richness.

The step that matters

Brown the scallops in the oven. The crumb topping needs enough heat and fat to brown without drying out the chicken beneath. Watch the colour closely, since the filling is already cooked and only needs the topping to set and turn golden.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, meat, cream, pepper, bread, butter):

  1. Garlicfits about as well
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Celeryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, meat, cream, pepper, bread, butter. 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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