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Good Chicken Patties

A dish of minced chicken seasoned with salt, mace, and cayenne, cooked in butter and white sauce, served in pastry crusts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Good Chicken Patties

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Remove the white flesh from the fowl and cut it into pieces.

  2. Melt the butter in a small saucepan.

  3. Add the chicken pieces to the melted butter.

  4. Season the chicken with salt, mace, and cayenne.

  5. Stew the seasoned chicken gently for 10 minutes without browning.

  6. Transfer the chicken to a dish with the butter and its own gravy.

  7. Let the chicken cool.

Make the filling

  1. Mince the chicken with a sharp knife.

  2. Heat the minced chicken in good white sauce without boiling.

  3. Alternatively, stew the minced chicken with strong gravy.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill the patty crusts or vol-au-vents with the mixture just before serving.

  2. Bake the patties for 15-18 minutes.

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 + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sauce + mushroomtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,480 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Mace + mushroomtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,529 recipes

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

  5. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Butter and sauce 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

Young fowl
Provides the main chicken meat that forms the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture while the chicken gently stews.
White sauce
Binds the minced chicken into a moist, creamy filling.
Strong gravy
Adds savoury depth and moisture to the chicken filling.

The step that matters

Stewing without browning. Stewing the chicken gently keeps it tender and moist. Browning or boiling toughens the proteins and dries the meat, which spoils the texture of the filling.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Macethe original

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