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Chicken Terrapin

A creamy chicken dish with butter, flour, cream, sherry, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chicken Terrapin

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken and chop the white meat into small pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the cream in a double boiler until hot.

  2. Melt the butter in a stew pan until it bubbles.

  3. Stir in the flour and gradually add the hot cream.

  4. Mix in the pounded yolks of the hard boiled eggs and the chopped chicken.

  5. Add the sherry wine and season with salt and pepper.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

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

  4. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Chicken + sherrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together891 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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
Enriches the sauce with fat and rich flavor while helping form its base.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a smooth, stable sauce when cooked in the melted butter.
Cream
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, giving it a smooth, rich texture.
Hard boiled egg yolks
Add richness and body, thickening the sauce while adding flavor.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth that balances the richness of the cream and butter.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and gradually add the hot cream. Adding cream too quickly to the roux can leave lumps. Adding it gradually while stirring lets the starch disperse evenly, producing a smooth sauce.

“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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