Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Cream

A steamed chicken custard made with cooked chicken breast, light sauce, eggs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sauce and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Chicken Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Scrape the flesh from the breast of the fowl and pound it in a mortar.

  2. Pass the pounded flesh through a sieve.

  3. Add the beaten eggs, half of the light sauce, and seasoning to the mixture.

Cook and serve

  1. Butter a mold and pour in the mixture.

  2. Steam slowly for 25 minutes.

  3. Serve with the remaining light sauce.

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. Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Mace + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Sauce and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Cooked fowl breast
Provides the main body of the cream, as the finely pounded flesh forms the base.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set when gently heated, giving the cream a firm, sliceable texture.
Light sauce
Adds moisture, keeping the cream tender rather than dry as it cooks.

The step that matters

Steam slowly for 25 minutes. Egg-based mixtures turn grainy or spongy if heated too hard or fast. Gentle, slow steam lets the egg proteins set evenly, producing a smooth, tender cream.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, pepper, butter, 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.

More chicken cream recipes

Soup 27Sauce 6 See all 18 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes