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Fricassee Chicken

A stew of young chickens simmered in water with salt, pepper, butter, and optional celery, thickened with flour and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Fricassee Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Cut up the chickens and place them in a stew pan with enough cold water to cover them.

  2. Cover the pan and heat slowly, then stew for about 1 hour or until tender.

  3. For older chickens, stew for 3 to 4 hours until tender.

  4. Season with salt and pepper, add the butter, and celery if desired.

Make the gravy

  1. Mix the flour with a little water or milk, then add to the stew along with the beaten egg yolks.

  2. Let the mixture boil for 1 minute.

Serve

  1. Arrange the chicken on a warm platter, pour some gravy over it, and serve the rest in a separate dish.

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 + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Chickens
Provide the meat that becomes tender through slow stewing.
Flour
Thickens the stew liquid into a smooth gravy as it heats.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the gravy, adding richness and body.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour to the finished gravy.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and egg yolks to the stew. Flour mixed with liquid first avoids lumps, and the egg yolks must be added off a hard boil or they can curdle. Boiling briefly after adding them thickens the gravy fully.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, butter, egg, flour, milk):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Celerythe original

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