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Chicken Fillets

Chicken fillets boiled in butter and lemon, served warm with white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,902 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Chicken Fillets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter a plate.

  2. Lay the chicken breasts on the buttered plate.

  3. Squeeze a few drops of lemon juice over the chicken.

  4. Cover with another buttered plate.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the plates over a pan of boiling water.

  2. Let them cook for 20 to 30 minutes.

  3. Serve the fillets on a warm dish, or with white sauce.

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. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  2. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Chicken breasts
Provide the main protein, which sets gently as it cooks and turns opaque.
Butter
Adds richness and helps keep the chicken moist during gentle cooking.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright citrus aroma that cut the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Gentle steaming over boiling water. The covered plates trap steam that cooks the chicken gently. Cooking too long or too hot toughens the proteins, so the chicken dries out and becomes stringy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Grapefits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Avocadofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter. 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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