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Fillets of Chicken and Supreme Sauce

Chicken fillets simmered with stock, mushrooms, and onion, finished in a butter‑flour gravy with cream and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fillets of Chicken and Supreme Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the chicken

  1. Skin the chicken breasts and divide them.

  2. Sprinkle with lemon juice and place in a stew pan with stock, mushroom liquid, and sliced onion.

  3. Simmer slowly for one hour.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter, add flour, and mix into a smooth paste.

  2. Add gravy from the stew pan and seasonings; boil for five minutes.

  3. Strain into another pan, add mushrooms, heat, and stir in cream.

Serve

  1. Arrange the fillets on a serving dish, coat with sauce, and place mushrooms in the center.

  2. Garnish with half‑rounds of cooked ham or tongue warmed in clear stock.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Chicken + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  3. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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 turns tender and moist during slow simmering.
Butter
Fat that combines with flour to form a roux, giving the sauce a rich body.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter into a smooth paste.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.
Preserved mushrooms
Add earthy flavor, and their liquid is reused to season the poaching liquid.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the chicken and balances the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Make the roux paste smooth before adding gravy. Flour must be fully blended into the melted butter so it does not form lumps. Lumps cannot be dispersed later, so the sauce turns out grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, mushroom, onion, pepper, flour, butter, cream. 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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