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Italian Spaghetti

A chicken stew with onions, garlic, mushrooms, tomatoes, and parsley served over boiled spaghetti.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Italian Spaghetti

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the chicken

  1. Coat chicken pieces in flour and fry in hot fat until brown.

  2. Remove chicken and place in a pot with boiling water.

Make the stew

  1. In the same fat, fry chopped onions and garlic until done.

  2. Add mushrooms and tomatoes to the onion mixture and cook together.

  3. Combine the cooked mixture with the chicken, adding parsley, red pepper, and salt.

  4. Let the stew simmer slowly for about 4 hours or until thick.

Serve

  1. Boil spaghetti in slightly salted water for 1 hour.

  2. Serve the chicken stew over the spaghetti on a hot platter.

  3. Sprinkle grated Edam cheese over the top 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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Chicken + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  4. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Garlic + mushroomtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,700 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main protein and meaty body of the stew as it simmers.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, building the base flavour of the stew.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and liquid that helps the stew thicken during long simmering.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and a soft, meaty texture to the stew.
Flour
Coats the chicken so it browns in the fat and helps thicken the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmering the stew. A long, slow simmer lets the chicken become tender and the sauce reduce and thicken. Too fast a boil can toughen the meat and scorch the bottom of the pot.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, flour, onion, garlic, mushroom, tomato, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Oreganofits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, flour, onion, garlic, mushroom, tomato, parsley. 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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