Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Dressed As Terrapin

A shredded chicken dish coated with a butter, flour, and egg yolk mixture, simmered with wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Chicken Dressed As Terrapin

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Remove the skin and bones from the chickens and shred the meat into small pieces.

  2. Place the shredded chicken in a covered stew pan with boiling water.

Make the sauce and finish

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, butter, and egg yolks until smooth.

  2. Add the mixture to the chicken in the pan, half at a time, stirring vigorously.

  3. Season with salt and pepper, and let it simmer for 10 minutes.

  4. Stir in the wine and serve hot.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

Flour and butter 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

Chicken
Provides the main body of the dish as shredded meat.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture and add richness as they set gently with heat.
Flour
Thickens the liquid so the sauce becomes smooth and lightly body-rich.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the rich, buttery sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg mixture to the chicken. Adding the egg yolk mixture in portions while stirring vigorously helps it blend evenly. Adding it all at once or letting the pan get too hot can cause the yolks to scramble and curdle instead of thickening the sauce smoothly.

“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.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes