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Minced Chicken

A savory dish of diced chicken cooked with butter, flour, stock, egg yolk, lemon rind, nutmeg, pepper, salt, and optional bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the chicken mixture

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

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

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

  4. Stir in the egg yolk and mix well.

Prepare the bacon and serve

  1. If using bacon, roll the strips and skewer them.

  2. Bake the bacon in the oven at 400°F (200°C) until crispy 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, binding sauce.
Stock or milk
Forms the liquid base that becomes the moist sauce.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the mixture, giving it a smooth, set texture.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens when heated, but if the mixture is too hot when it is added, the yolk can scramble. Remove the pan from direct heat before stirring it in.

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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