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Minced Chicken

A savory sauce made with minced chicken, butter, flour, stock, egg yolk, lemon rind, nutmeg, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Minced Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour and add the stock; bring to a boil.

  3. Add the chicken, lemon rind, nutmeg, pepper, and salt; heat thoroughly.

  4. Stir in the egg yolk and season to taste.

Serve

  1. If using bacon, roll thin strips and skewer them; bake until crisp and serve around the dish.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth gravy as it cooks.
Egg yolk
Enriches the gravy and adds body when stirred in off the heat.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries the flavour of the gravy.
Cooked chicken
Provides the main meat and substance of the gravy.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolk and season to taste. Adding the yolk to a boiling mixture can scramble it and leave lumps. Stirring it in gently as the gravy cools slightly keeps it smooth and thickened.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Parsleyfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, flour, milk, egg, lemon, pepper. 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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