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Chicken a LA Creme

Stuffed chicken breast with a cream sauce made from milk, butter, flour, bacon, and shallots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 14,036 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Remove the entire breast from the half roast chicken, keeping the pinions, legs, and skin intact.

  2. Boil the bread crumbs and finely chopped bacon in milk.

  3. Season the chicken breast meat with pepper, salt, nutmeg, and grated lemon peel.

  4. Pound the seasoned chicken breast with the boiled bread crumbs.

  5. Add the beaten egg.

  6. Stuff the mixture back into the chicken to resemble a whole chicken.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine milk, butter kneaded with flour, a slice of bacon, shallots, salt, and white pepper to make the sauce.

Assemble and finish

  1. Sift grated bread over the stuffed chicken.

  2. Place the chicken in a dish.

  3. Brown the chicken with a salamander.

  4. Heat the chicken thoroughly in the sauce.

  5. Strain the sauce over the chicken.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together14,036 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,118 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,039 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together5,062 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken breast meat
Forms the main body of the dish and carries the seasoning and stuffing.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the boiled milk and bind with the chicken, giving the stuffing a soft, moist texture.
Egg
Binds the pounded chicken and crumb mixture so it holds its shape.
Butter and flour
Kneaded together to thicken the sauce into a smooth, rich coating.
Bacon
Adds savoury fat and flavour to both the stuffing and the sauce.
Milk
Forms the base of the sauce and softens the bread crumbs in the stuffing.

The step that matters

Heat the chicken thoroughly in the sauce. The stuffed chicken is dense, so the centre must reach a full heat through slow simmering in the sauce; the egg-bound stuffing needs to set without the sauce breaking or scorching.

Flavor stand-ins for the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, bread, parsley, pepper, lemon, egg, milk):

  1. Marjorambetter flavor fit
  2. Thymebetter flavor fit
  3. Dillabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, bread, parsley, pepper, lemon, egg, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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