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Chicken a LA King

A creamy chicken dish with green pepper, pimentos, and optional mushrooms, capers, and sherry, served with toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,688 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chicken a LA King

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the hen until very tender, then let it cool in the broth and cut into small, neat pieces, discarding any dark or coarse meat.

Make the sauce

  1. Heat olive oil in a saucepan and add chopped green pepper; cook until tender.

  2. Add chopped pimentos and chicken to the saucepan.

  3. Blend cream with flour and butter in another saucepan, cooking until thickened while stirring constantly.

  4. Stir in beaten egg yolks, salt, and paprika, then strain this mixture over the chicken.

  5. Add mushrooms, capers, and sherry if desired.

Serve

  1. Serve on a large platter surrounded by triangles of toast.

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. Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Olive + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,571 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  5. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hen
Provides the tender cooked meat that forms the body of the dish.
Cream
Makes the rich, smooth sauce that coats the chicken and pimentos.
Flour
Thickens the cream with butter into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce, adding body and a richer texture.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the cream and flour base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the cream, flour and butter until thickened. Flour must be cooked while stirring constantly so starch granules swell evenly and the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps or scorching on the pan bottom.

Swap the capers

The recipe marks capers as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (olive, pepper, cream, flour, butter, egg, mushroom):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, pepper, cream, flour, butter, egg, mushroom. 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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