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Brown Fricassee of Chicken

A braised chicken dish cooked with salt pork, flour, and chicken broth, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,417 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Brown Fricassee of Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cut the chickens into pieces.

  2. Parboil the chicken pieces in water until tender.

  3. Drain the chicken pieces and set them aside.

  4. Slice the salt pork.

  5. Fry the sliced salt pork until brown, then remove it from the pan.

Fry and make the gravy

  1. Dredge the chicken pieces with salt, pepper, and flour.

  2. Fry the dredged chicken pieces in the pork fat until dark brown.

  3. Stir 1/2 cup of dry flour into the remaining pork fat until dark brown.

  4. Pour in 1 quart of boiling chicken broth.

  5. Season the broth with salt and pepper.

Simmer and serve

  1. Add the fried chicken to the gravy.

  2. Simmer the mixture for 20 minutes.

  3. Garnish with boiled rice before serving.

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 + porktop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,417 recipes

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

  2. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Chicken + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Chicken and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,559 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

Chickens
Provide the meat that becomes tender through parboiling and then browns in frying.
Salt pork
Its rendered fat browns the chicken and flour and adds savory flavor to the gravy.
Flour
Dredging and cooking it in the fat thickens the broth into a gravy and helps browning.
Chicken broth
Forms the liquid base of the gravy that the chicken simmers in.

The step that matters

Stir 1/2 cup of dry flour into the remaining pork fat until dark brown.. Flour cooked in fat must be stirred constantly to brown evenly without scorching. Deeply browned flour gives the gravy its color and nutty flavor, while under-browned flour tastes raw and pasty.

“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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