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Chicken Broth

A clear broth made by simmering a young fowl with water, herbs, onion, mace, peppercorns, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Chicken Broth

Why it works: Mace and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,078 recipes. Both carry eugenol, which smells clove, spicy. The science ↓

Chicken Broth

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Place the fowl and all ingredients in a saucepan.

  2. Simmer gently for 1.5 hours, skimming the broth carefully.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the broth and cool it until needed.

  2. Remove the fat from the top before warming up the desired amount to serve.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Mace + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Releases gelatin and savory flavor into the water as it simmers slowly.
Water
Acts as the cooking liquid that extracts flavor and body from the fowl.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth to the broth's background flavor.

The step that matters

Simmer gently and skim the broth. A gentle simmer keeps the broth clear, while a hard boil emulsifies fat and cloudy particles into it. Skimming removes the foam that rises as impurities coagulate, giving a cleaner, clearer result.

“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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