Skip to main content

Chicken Souffle

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Capers and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chicken Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, mix the shredded chicken, celery, and egg white.

  2. Stir in the salad oil and vinegar, then season with salt and pepper.

  3. Let the mixture stand for one hour.

  4. When ready to serve, stir in the mayonnaise.

  5. Arrange the salad on a bed of crisp lettuce.

  6. Garnish with gherkins, capers, anchovies, olives, and optionally, yolks rubbed through a fine sieve.

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. Capers + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Capers + olivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Capers + anchovytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together473 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  5. Chicken + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,888 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid hexyl ester (sweet, green).

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

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, vinegar, pepper, capers, anchovy, olive):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, vinegar, pepper, capers, anchovy, olive. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

More chicken salad recipes

Dressing 31Sandwich 8with Mayonnaise 6Cream Cheese 5Moulded 5Chinese 4 See all 638 →

You might also like

Salad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipesBoiled Salad DressingBoiled Salad Dressing67 recipes