Skip to main content
Main

Another Way to Fricassee Chickens

A stew of chicken joints simmered in a butter‑flour sauce with onions, mace, and finished with a cream‑egg yolk mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Another Way to Fricassee Chickens

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Combine water, butter, flour, salt, and white pepper in a stew-pan.

  2. Heat the mixture until hot.

Stew

  1. Add the chicken joints and minced onions.

  2. Add the blade of mace.

  3. Stew for 1 hour.

Finish

  1. Beat the egg yolks with cream.

  2. Stir the egg yolk mixture into the stew gradually, ensuring it does not boil.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. White pepper + macetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, giving it a rich, smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a sauce as it heats.
Egg yolks
Thicken the finished sauce and make it creamy when stirred in gently.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness, and softens the sauce's flavour.
Chicken
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender during slow stewing.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolk mixture. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat. If the stew boils, the yolks can curdle and become grainy, so add them gradually and keep the liquid below boiling.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, chicken, onion, mace, egg, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, chicken, onion, mace, egg, cream. 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.

More chicken fricassee recipes

with Mushrooms 6White 6Cold 4with Tomato Sauce 3 See all 369 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes