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Two Chickens and Tarragon

Two chickens are boiled and served with a tarragon‑infused béchamel sauce and garnished with paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and tarragon work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 619 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

Two Chickens and Tarragon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the chickens for about 15 minutes.

  2. Remove the chickens and place them in a clean cloth, squeezing them dry to avoid excess water.

Make the tarragon sauce

  1. Pick and blanch some tarragon.

  2. In a small saucepan, combine the tarragon with enough béchamel sauce for the chickens.

Serve

  1. Serve the chickens and pour the sauce over them, ensuring the sauce is thick enough to cling to the chickens.

  2. Garnish with paste.

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 + tarragontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together619 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  2. Tarragon + saucetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together566 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Chicken + saucetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Chickens
Provide the main protein, which firms and turns opaque as it cooks.
Tarragon
Adds its distinctive aromatic, anise-like flavour to the sauce.
Béchamel sauce
Carries the tarragon and coats the chicken with a creamy, thickened layer.

The step that matters

Squeezing the chickens dry. Excess water left on the chicken dilutes the sauce and stops it from clinging, so the sauce becomes thin and runny instead of coating the meat.

Swap the tarragon

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Tarragonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, sauce. 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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