Skip to main content
Main

Chickens or Turkeys with Celery

A chicken or turkey served with a creamy celery sauce made with cream, lemon, spices, and consommé.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Chickens or Turkeys with Celery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil or braise the chicken or turkey until three-quarters cooked. Let it cool.

  2. Remove the skin and cut the white meat into strips.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the meat, cream, lemon peel, mace, cayenne pepper, salt, shallot, lemon juice, and consommé.

  2. Thicken the mixture with flour and enough water to create a sauce.

  3. Simmer over low heat for 10 minutes before serving.

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. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + shallottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

Chicken or turkey
Provides the main body of meat that the sauce coats and surrounds.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a sauce as it heats with the water.
Consommé
Adds concentrated savory meat flavor to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the cream and balances richness.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with flour and water. Flour must be fully mixed in and gently heated so its starch swells and thickens the sauce smoothly. Added unevenly or boiled too hard, it can form lumps or a pasty texture.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, cream, lemon, pepper, shallot, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, cream, lemon, pepper, shallot, 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.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes