Skip to main content
Main

Creamed Chicken

Creamed Chicken is a dish of boiled hen, calf brains, and mushrooms in a milk, flour, and butter sauce seasoned with red pepper and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Creamed Chicken

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Boil the hen until very tender, then chop into small pieces.

  2. Clean and parboil the calf brains, then cut into large pieces.

  3. Slice the mushrooms and mix them with the chicken and brains.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, heat the milk and whisk in the flour and butter until smooth.

  2. Season the mixture with red pepper and coarse sea salt.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the chicken mixture and bake in shells or ramekins for 15 minutes.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Mushroom + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Hen
Provides the main cooked meat, which becomes tender after long boiling and is chopped for the filling.
Calf brains
Add a soft, rich texture to the filling after being parboiled and cut into large pieces.
Mushrooms
Add moisture and earthy flavor to the chicken and brain mixture.
Milk
Forms the base of the white sauce, giving it a creamy body and moisture.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce that binds the filling together.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce and helps it stay smooth when whisked with flour.

The step that matters

Whisk the flour and butter into the milk until smooth. Flour must be fully whisked into the hot milk so its starch disperses evenly and thickens the sauce without lumps. Lumps form when flour clumps before it hydrates, and they are hard to remove once the sauce thickens.

“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.

More creamed chicken recipes

with Mushrooms 5and Mushrooms 4Soup 3Toast 3 See all 110 →

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes