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Chicken with Aspic Jelly

Chicken with aspic jelly served with salad greens, mayonnaise sauce, hard-boiled eggs, beetroot, tomato, radishes, celery, parsley, and buttered sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Chicken with Aspic Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken in weak stock for 45 minutes to 1 hour, depending on size.

  2. Remove the chicken and let it cool, then wipe off excess fat and cut into neat joints.

Make the sauce

  1. For the chicken sauce, melt butter in a pan, add flour, and stir in chicken stock. Flavor the stock with mace, peppercorns, onion, and lemon rind.

Mould and assemble

  1. Mould each joint with sauce and let it set, then mould again with melted Aspic jelly just before it sets.

  2. Prepare a pile of salad in the center of a dish and create a border with more salad.

  3. Drizzle mayonnaise sauce over the border and sprinkle with salad to cover the sauce.

  4. Arrange the chicken pieces around the salad border, overlapping them.

  5. Garnish the salad center with sliced hard-boiled eggs, beetroot, tomato, radishes, or celery.

  6. Sprinkle alternate chicken pieces with sieved egg yolk and finely chopped parsley.

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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Beetroot + radishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together52 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  4. Beetroot + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together745 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Radish + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together120 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main cooked protein that the jelly and sauce coat and set around.
Aspic jelly
Sets into a clear gel that holds the coating and gives the dish its glossy finish.
Butter
Enriches the sauce base and gives it a rich, smooth flavour.
Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a sauce that coats the chicken.
Hard-boiled eggs
Adds a firm, mild garnish and yolk for colour and richness on the platter.

The step that matters

Mould the second coat of Aspic jelly just before it sets. Gelatin-based jelly sets quickly as it cools; if it is too cold or already firm, it clumps and forms an uneven layer, while if it is too warm it slides off the chicken.

Swap the radish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, sauce, egg, beetroot, tomato, celery, parsley):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Radishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, sauce, egg, beetroot, tomato, celery, parsley. 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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