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Chicken Fricassee

A chicken stew served over broken baking powder biscuits, thickened with flour and seasoned with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Chicken Fricassee

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Wash and cut up the chicken.

  2. Place the chicken in a kettle and cover with cold water.

  3. Add a little coarse sea salt and boil until tender.

  4. Remove the chicken and set aside.

  5. Cut up 1/4 head of celery.

Assemble and serve

  1. On a platter, lay broken baking powder biscuits.

  2. Place the pieces of chicken on the biscuits.

  3. Season the chicken with butter.

  4. If desired, add oysters to the chicken.

  5. Thicken the gravy with flour moistened with water or milk.

  6. Pour the gravy over the chicken and biscuits.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Biscuit + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Celery + biscuittop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together150 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + oystertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Chicken
Provides the main protein and meat flavor, becoming tender through long gentle boiling.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy when moistened and stirred in.
Baking powder biscuits
Soak up the gravy and form the base that the chicken rests on.
Butter
Adds richness and fat-based flavor to the cooked chicken.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy with flour moistened with water or milk. Flour added dry to hot liquid clumps; mixing it first into a smooth paste with cold water or milk lets the starch disperse evenly so the gravy thickens smoothly.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, biscuit, butter, oyster, flour, milk):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, biscuit, butter, oyster, flour, milk. 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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