Skip to main content
Main

Chicken with Peas

A stew of chicken pieces with peas, butter, mace, flour, sugar, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Chicken with Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cut the fowl into neat pieces.

  2. In a stewpan, melt the butter and add the fowl, frying until golden brown.

Stew and serve

  1. Sprinkle in the mace, pepper, and salt.

  2. Dredge in the flour and stir well.

  3. Add the peas, sugar, and gravy, then stew for 20 minutes.

  4. Arrange the peas in the center of a dish with the meat around them.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Peas + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Butter + peastop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Fowl
Provides the meat, which is browned in butter and then stewed until tender.
Butter
Fat for frying, which browns the meat and adds richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the gravy and sauce as it stews, giving it body.
Green peas
Add sweetness and a fresh vegetable element that is served in the center of the dish.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the stew, carrying flavor and moisture to the meat and peas.

The step that matters

Frying the fowl until golden brown. Browning builds flavor through the Maillard reaction, which needs a hot pan and dry meat surface. Crowding the pan or frying in too little fat steams the meat instead, leaving it pale and less flavorful.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar, peas, 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.

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes