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Fricassee of Chickens, a LA Chevaliere

A French 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. Remove the legs and wings from the chicken.

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

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

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

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate sauté pan, cook the remaining chicken pieces with button mushrooms, cocks' combs, and chopped truffles.

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

  3. Incorporate the sauce with a leason 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. Nutmeg + peppertop 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce into a smooth, rich leason as they set gently with heat.
Button mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and body to the sauce as they cook down.
Chopped truffles
Contribute an intense, aromatic earthy flavour to the sauce.
Fat bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour, keeping the lean chicken moist as it cooks.

The step that matters

Incorporate the leason of egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently, but if the sauce is too hot they can scramble and curdle. Add the leason off the heat or over very low heat, stirring constantly, so the sauce becomes smooth and lightly thickened.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

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