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Fricassee of Chickens

A stew of chicken simmered with veal or mutton, onion, mace, lemon peel, white pepper, sweet herbs, and a thickened sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Fricassee of Chickens

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken in a small quantity of water until cooked through.

  2. Let the boiled chicken cool.

  3. Cut the chicken into pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. Simmer the pieces in the reserved cooking liquid with veal or mutton, onion, mace, lemon peel, white pepper, and sweet herbs.

  2. Keep the chicken warm.

  3. Strain the sauce.

  4. Return the strained sauce to the saucepan.

  5. Add salt, nutmeg, flour, and butter to the sauce.

  6. Thicken the sauce over low heat.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter, giving it body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and smoothing the sauce's texture.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma to the cooking liquid that becomes the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce over low heat. Flour needs gentle heat to thicken smoothly; high heat can scorch the butter and flour or leave lumps, and the sauce can break or turn grainy if it boils hard.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, veal, onion, mace, lemon, nutmeg, flour):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, veal, onion, mace, lemon, nutmeg, flour. 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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