Why it works: Chicken and barley work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 265 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓
Chicken Cream
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the soup
Shred the chicken with a knife.
Put the chicken, barley, salt, and water into a saucepan.
Simmer very slowly for 1½ hours.
Strain the mixture and pound the solid part in a mortar.
Pass the mixture through a wire sieve and add it to the liquid.
Serve or set
Reheat and serve warm.
Dissolve ½ oz. of extract of calves’ feet in 2 tablespoons of cold water.
Stir the mixture thoroughly.
Pour the mixture into molds.
Turn out the molds like cream.
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.
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Chicken + barleytop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together265 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Chicken breast
- Provides the meat flavour and body of the soup as it simmers.
- Pearl barley
- Thickens the soup and adds a soft, starchy body as it cooks.
- Extract of calves’ feet
- Sets the cold version into a firm jelly as it cools.
The step that matters
Simmer very slowly for 1½ hours. Slow, gentle heat extracts flavour and gelatin from the chicken without boiling it toughly or clouding the liquid, giving a clear, well-flavoured result.
“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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