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Fricassee of Chickens, a LA Chevaliere

A chicken fricassee with bacon, mushrooms, truffles, and a sauce of egg yolks, nutmeg, and mignonette pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,172 recipes. Both carry 1-butyl acetate, which smells fruity, banana. The science ↓

Fricassee of Chickens, a LA Chevaliere

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Draw and singe the chicken, then remove the legs and wings.

  2. Slit the skin of the breast and remove the fillets with the pinion bone attached.

  3. Trim each fillet and lard them, placing in a small sauté pan with thin layers of fat bacon.

  4. Trim the minion fillets, extract the sinew, and decorate with black truffle.

  5. Place the minion fillets in a sauté pan with butter.

  6. Cut the remaining chicken into pieces for the fricassee.

Make the fricassee

  1. In a stewpan, combine smaller chicken pieces with button mushrooms, cocks' combs, and truffles.

  2. Reduce the mixture by boiling until it reaches the consistency of Allemande sauce.

  3. Incorporate the sauce with a liaison of egg yolks, grated nutmeg, and mignonette pepper.

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. Chicken + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  2. Truffle + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,900 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Butter + truffletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main meat, with fillets larded for moisture and tenderness during cooking.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce into a smooth, creamy liaison as they set gently with heat.
Button mushrooms
Add savoury, earthy flavour and body to the fricassee.
Fat bacon
Lards the fillets, adding fat that keeps the lean breast meat moist.
Butter
Adds richness and helps brown the fillets in the sauté pan.

The step that matters

Incorporating the egg yolk liaison. If the sauce is too hot when the egg yolks go in, they can scramble and curdle. Stir gently over low heat, off a hard boil, so the yolks thicken the sauce smoothly.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, butter, truffle, mushroom, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, butter, truffle, mushroom, egg. 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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