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Puffs with Chicken, &C

A puff pastry filled with chicken, ham, anchovy, parsley, lemon peel, shallot, spices, and béchamel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Puffs with Chicken, &C

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine the chicken, ham, anchovy, parsley, lemon peel, shallot, cayenne, and mace.

  2. Heat the mixture in a saucepan with the béchamel sauce for 5 minutes.

  3. Allow the mixture to cool, then roll out the puff pastry thinly.

Form and fry

  1. Cut the pastry into squares and place some of the filling on each square.

  2. Fold the pastry over the filling and seal the edges with a jagged cutter.

  3. Fry the puffs in boiling lard until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with chopped parsley underneath.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken breast
Provides the main body and protein of the filling.
Béchamel sauce
Binds the filling together and keeps it moist and creamy.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, layered shell that puffs and browns when fried.
Lean ham
Adds savoury flavour and salty depth to the filling.
Shallot
Adds mild aromatic sweetness to the filling.

The step that matters

Cool the filling before rolling the pastry. A hot or wet filling softens the puff pastry, so the layers can melt and tear instead of puffing. Cooling it first keeps the pastry firm enough to seal and fry into flaky puffs.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, ham, anchovy, parsley, lemon, shallot, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, ham, anchovy, parsley, lemon, shallot, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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