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To Fricassee Fouls, and All Kinds of White Meats and Fish

A creamy fricassee made with chicken, butter, cream, spices, and optional mushrooms, oysters, or vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and 6,557 recipes mention both. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

To Fricassee Fouls, and All Kinds of White Meats and Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Prepare and truss the chicken.

  2. Boil the chicken.

Make the sauce

  1. Skim and simmer the chicken in a vegetable broth with mace, lemon zest, white pepper, salt, onion, and carrot for 12-15 minutes.

  2. Remove the chicken and strain the stock.

  3. Mix a piece of butter with rice or flour, cook until smooth.

  4. Add the butter and flour mixture to the stock.

  5. Cut up the chicken and warm it with the cream, but do not let it boil.

  6. Add egg yolks, and if desired, cooked mushrooms, oysters, or vegetables, along with lemon juice.

  7. For extra richness, add a small piece of butter and garnish with lemon slices.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  5. Nutmeg + white peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together1,375 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
Provides the meat and flavour that the broth and sauce are built around.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and with flour it thickens the sauce.
Rice or fine wheaten flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when cooked with butter.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce when added at the end.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Warm the chicken with the cream without boiling. Boiling a cream-and-egg sauce can cause it to curdle or separate, so it should be kept warm but not allowed to boil.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, butter, cream, nutmeg, egg, lemon, white pepper):

  1. Tarragonbetter flavor fit
  2. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  3. Thymebetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, cream, nutmeg, egg, lemon, white pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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