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Chicken a LA Maryland

A chicken soup with onions, carrots, turnip, celery, bay leaf, cloves, peppercorns, tomatoes, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Chicken a LA Maryland

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Clean the chicken, remove the head and legs, and place it in a pot of warm water to cover.

  2. Add the onion, carrot, turnip, bay leaf, cloves, peppercorns, and celery.

  3. Cook slowly until the chicken is tender, then remove the meat from the bones and cut it into 2-inch pieces.

  4. Cook the stock down to 1 cup.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and add the flour, stirring until smooth.

  2. Slowly stir in the cup of stock and then the strained tomatoes and chicken.

  3. Cook for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve surrounded by points of toast or in fried bread baskets or timbale cases.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main meat, and slow cooking in liquid keeps it tender and flavourful.
Butter
Melted with flour to form a roux that thickens the sauce and adds richness.
Flour
Forms a roux with butter that thickens the stock into a smooth sauce.
Tomatoes
Add acidity, body and colour to the sauce.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavour to the stock as it simmers.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and butter until smooth. Adding stock to a roux without stirring can leave lumps, because flour clumps when it hits liquid. Stirring the roux and adding stock slowly lets the starch disperse evenly, giving a smooth, thickened sauce.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, butter, flour):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, butter, flour. 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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