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Chicken Tamales

A steamed dish of chicken and tamale paste with hominy, eggs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,902 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Chicken Tamales

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the chickens and reserve the broth.

  2. Chop the chickens coarsely and mix with the chopped hard boiled eggs and tamale paste.

  3. Grind the cooked hominy and mix with the raw eggs, melted butter, salt, and pepper.

Assemble and steam

  1. Line a dish with the hominy mixture and fill it with the chicken mixture.

  2. Steam for 1 hour.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Chicken + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,991 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Chickens
Form the main savory meat filling and flavor the tamale.
Hominy
Forms the starchy base layer that gives the tamale its body.
Raw eggs
Bind the hominy mixture so it holds together and sets when steamed.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, moister texture.

The step that matters

Steaming the hominy layer. Raw eggs set through gentle, even heat and bind the hominy base. Overly vigorous steaming can make the eggs tough and cause the layers to separate.

“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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