Name: Chicken Jelly
Ingredients: 1 young chicken; 1 gallon water; 1 tablespoon rice; salt to taste

Why it works: Chicken and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,769 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Chicken Jelly

Ingredients

1 young chicken
1 gallon water
1 tablespoon rice
salt to taste

Directions

Make the broth

Pound the cleaned young chicken, bones included.
Boil the chicken in 1 gallon of water with a little salt.
Tie the rice in a cloth and drop it into the pot until soft.
Remove the rice and boil the liquid down to 1 pint.

Finish the jelly

Strain the jelly from the chicken and let it cool.

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.

Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,769 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Young chicken: Releases gelatin and flavour into the water as it simmers, forming the jelly base.
Rice: Tied in a cloth and simmered, it gently thickens and softens the broth while being removed before serving.

“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.