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Stewed Chickens

A stew of young chickens cooked with bacon, thyme, bay leaves, onion, parsley, butter, egg yolks, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Stewed Chickens

Ingredients

Directions

Cook

  1. Cook the chicken in a saucepan with bacon for 1 hour.

  2. Add thyme, bay leaves, onion, parsley, and butter.

  3. Mix egg yolks with cream and pour over the chicken.

  4. Remove the saucepan from the heat immediately.

Serve

  1. Arrange chicken pieces on a dish and 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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 meat that the dish is built around.
Bacon
Renders fat into the pan, adding savory flavor to the chicken.
Egg yolks
Thicken the cream into a rich sauce as they gently set with heat.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the sauce texture.

The step that matters

Remove the saucepan from the heat immediately.. Egg yolks set and can curdle or turn grainy if overheated, so the sauce should be taken off the heat as soon as it thickens.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, thyme, parsley, butter, egg, cream. 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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