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Sauce for Stewed Chicken

A thickened sauce made from chicken stock, flour, butter, and seasonings, served over stewed chicken.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Sauce for Stewed Chicken

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix flour with cold water and gradually add to chicken stock.

  2. Cook until the flour is well incorporated.

  3. Add butter and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve

  1. Place the chicken on a serving dish.

  2. Add chopped parsley to the sauce and pour over the chicken.

  3. If desired, stir in beaten egg yolks before serving.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

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

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

Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Egg yolks
Optional; add body and richness to the sauce when stirred in.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture to the stock. Flour lumps if it meets hot liquid undispersed. Mixing it with cold water first and adding it gradually lets the starch disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly once cooked.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Turmericfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, flour, pepper, egg. 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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