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Chickens and Peas

A savory dish of chicken pieces cooked with bacon, butter, stock, peas, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Chickens and Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Blanch and slice the bacon.

  2. Melt the butter in a pan and add the bacon; cook until lightly browned.

  3. Add the cut-up chickens and a little stock; mix well.

Season and finish

  1. Season with parsley, onions, garlic, and clove; let it boil.

  2. Add the peas and cook over high heat with the cover off; skim as needed.

  3. If the sauce is too thin, reduce it 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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Parsley + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Chicken + garlictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,850 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).

  5. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon
Renders fat and browns in the pan, adding savory flavor to the base.
Butter
Adds fat for browning and a rich, smooth flavor to the sauce.
Chicken
Provides the main protein, which firms and becomes tender as it cooks.
Chicken stock
Supplies liquid to moisten the dish and form the sauce.
Peas
Add sweetness and bulk, and their starch helps thicken the sauce slightly.

The step that matters

Reducing the sauce. If the liquid is too thin, the sauce will stay watery. Reducing it lets water evaporate, concentrating flavor and thickening the sauce before serving.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, chicken, parsley, onion, garlic, peas):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, chicken, parsley, onion, garlic, peas. 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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