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Chicken Stew with Vegetables

A stew of whole chickens cooked with butter, bacon, sweet corn, lima beans, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and lima beans work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 222 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Chicken Stew with Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and truss the chickens as directed.

  2. Place the chickens in a stewpan with cold water.

Make the stew

  1. Add the butter, bacon, sweet corn, and lima beans.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and cayenne to taste.

  3. Sprinkle flour over the mixture and stir well.

  4. Simmer until the chickens are cooked through and the vegetables are tender.

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. Corn + lima beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together222 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Chicken + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Chickens
Provide the main body of the stew, becoming tender and flavourful as they simmer.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounder, fuller flavour to the broth.
Bacon
Contributes smoky, savoury fat that flavours the stew.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid as it simmers, giving the stew body.
Lima beans
Add starch and texture, becoming tender during simmering.
Sweet corn
Adds natural sweetness and tender kernels to the stew.

The step that matters

Sprinkle flour over the mixture and stir well. Flour clumps easily if added to a hot liquid without being evenly dispersed. Stirring it through thoroughly before and during simmering lets the starch hydrate evenly, so the stew thickens smoothly rather than becoming lumpy.

Swap the lima beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, butter, corn, flour, pepper):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Lima beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, corn, flour, 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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