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Deviled Chicken with Sauce

A dish of boiled chicken served with a mustard, Worcestershire, and vinegar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,067 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Deviled Chicken with Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken in salted water until tender.

  2. Let the chicken cool, then cut it into pieces.

Broil and sauce

  1. Baste the chicken pieces with butter and broil them.

  2. For the sauce, combine mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and vinegar in a pot and boil together.

  3. Pour the sauce over the broiled chicken.

Alternative and serving

  1. Alternatively, season the chicken pieces with pepper and salt, roll them in flour, and sauté in hot lard.

  2. Serve with cream sauce.

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. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mustard + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the chicken brown under the broiler.
Flour
Forms a light coating that helps the chicken brown and crisp when sautéed.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savory, tangy depth to the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the sauce and balances its richness.
Made mustard
Adds pungent heat that gives the sauce its deviled character.

The step that matters

Boiling the sauce. Boiling the mustard, Worcestershire and vinegar together concentrates and blends their flavours, while the vinegar's acidity is volatile, so it can taste sharp if it is overcooked or left to reduce too far.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Mustardthe original
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Onionfits about as well
  4. Potatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, sauce, vinegar, flour, 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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