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Stewed Chickens

A stew of chicken pieces cooked in water with salt, served over baked biscuit squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and biscuit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 889 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Chickens

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cut the chickens into small pieces.

  2. Cover the pieces with water and stew gently until thoroughly cooked.

  3. Add a little coarse sea salt to the stew.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix 2 tablespoons of flour with ½ cup of milk until smooth.

  2. Add the yolk of 1 egg to the flour mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Prepare biscuit dough, roll it out, and cut into squares.

  2. Bake the squares until light brown.

  3. Place the squares on a dish and pour the stewed chickens over them.

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. Flour + biscuittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Chicken + biscuittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together332 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Chickens
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender as it stews in water.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth, binding base.
Egg
Adds richness and helps bind the smooth mixture.
Biscuit dough
Forms light, browned squares that hold the stewed chicken.

“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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