Name: Creamed Chicken
Ingredients: 2 cups white sauce; 2 tablespoons salad oil; cold roast chicken

Why it works: Sauce and chicken are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,513 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Creamed Chicken

Ingredients

2 cups white sauce
2 tablespoons salad oil
cold roast chicken

Directions

Prepare

Cut the cold roast chicken into slices.
Dip the chicken slices in salad oil and let sit for 1 hour.
Prepare the white sauce.

Cook and serve

Cook the chicken in the white sauce for about 5 minutes.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Sauce + chickentop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,513 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

White sauce: Forms the creamy body of the dish and keeps the chicken moist.
Cold roast chicken: Provides the main protein, which absorbs flavor from the sauce as it warms.

“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.