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Chicken Terrapin

A creamy chicken dish with eggs and lemon, simmered after boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Chicken Terrapin

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Remove all bones and gristle from the cold chicken and cut it into small pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. In a chafing dish, combine the cream and butter, then mix in the flour, pepper, and salt.

  2. Add the chicken to the mixture and bring it to a boil.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the chopped hard boiled eggs and lemon juice.

  2. Let it simmer for a moment and then serve.

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

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

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + chickentop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Forms the rich, smooth body of the sauce and carries the other ingredients.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that gives the sauce a silky mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cream and butter into a sauce that clings to the chicken.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream sauce.
Hard boiled eggs
Add body and a soft, creamy texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the lemon juice after the flour-thickened sauce is ready. Acid can curdle or thin cream if it is added to a hot, unthickened mixture, so the flour should be fully blended in first and the lemon stirred in at the end, with only a gentle simmer rather than vigorous boiling.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Raisinfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, butter, flour, pepper, chicken, egg. 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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