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Chicken Panada

A creamy chicken soup with bread, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Chicken Panada

Why it works: Chicken and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,241 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Chicken Panada

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Remove the skin from the chicken breast and cut the flesh into small pieces.

  2. Place the chicken pieces in a jar and sprinkle with salt.

  3. Cover the jar with greased paper and place it in a saucepan with enough water to come three-quarters up the jar.

  4. Cover the saucepan and boil the water for 1 hour, adding more boiling water as needed.

Make the custard

  1. Remove the chicken from the jar and pound it with the egg yolk in a mortar, then pass it through a fine sieve.

  2. Add the cream to the juice in the jar, ensuring there are about 3 tablespoons of the mixture, and pour it over the pounded chicken.

  3. Stir the mixture over low heat until thickened, but do not let it boil.

Serve

  1. Dip the toast in hot milk and pile the chicken mixture on top.

  2. Add a squeeze of lemon juice to enhance the flavor, and serve very 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.

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.

  1. Chicken + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

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

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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 breast
Provides the main protein that becomes the smooth, savory body of the dish.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps bind the pounded chicken into a smooth, cohesive mixture.
Cream
Adds fat and moisture, giving the mixture a softer, silkier texture.
Toast
Soaks up hot milk to form a soft base that holds the chicken mixture.

The step that matters

Stir over low heat until thickened, without boiling. Egg yolk proteins thicken gently at moderate heat. Boiling can curdle the yolk and cause the mixture to turn grainy and separate instead of becoming smooth.

“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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