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Chicken Fricasseed

A stew of chicken pieces cooked in a sauce of water, onion, herbs, and spices, thickened with rizine and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Chicken Fricasseed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Stew any bones and trimmings with 1 pint of water, onion, herbs, and seasonings.

  2. If necessary, add a little desiccated soup for flavor.

  3. Cut the fowl into neat pieces.

  4. When the gravy is reduced to ½ pint, strain it and add the fowl.

Finish and thicken

  1. Heat until hot, then thicken with a little rizine.

  2. Add the beaten eggs and stir until hot, but do not boil to prevent curdling.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Mace + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. Lemon + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,315 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Fowl
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender as it simmers in the gravy.
Eggs
Thicken and enrich the sauce as they set gently with heat.
Rizine
Thickens the gravy so it coats the fowl.
Onion
Adds savory depth to the stewed gravy base.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten eggs. Egg proteins set when heated, so if the sauce boils after the eggs go in, they can curdle and turn grainy. Stir gently and keep the heat below a boil.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, lemon, onion, 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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