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Chicken Jelly

A gelatinous dish made from chicken broth thickened with cornstarch and butter, served over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chicken Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the aspic

  1. Boil the chicken in water to make 1 cup of liquid.

  2. Thicken the liquid lightly with cornstarch mixed in melted butter.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over a slice of nicely toasted bread.

  2. Serve hot.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

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

Cold chicken
Gives the liquid its meaty flavour as it cooks into the water.
Cornstarch
Thickens the liquid so it coats the toast instead of running off.
Butter
Carries the cornstarch smoothly into the liquid and adds richness.
Toasted bread
Serves as the base that soaks up the thickened mixture.

The step that matters

Thicken the liquid lightly with cornstarch mixed in melted butter. Cornstarch thickens when heated in liquid, but clumps if added dry. Mixing it into melted butter first helps it disperse evenly, and only light thickening keeps the mixture pourable over the toast.

“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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