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Chicken Jelly

Chicken jelly is a gelatinous broth made by boiling chicken, then straining and setting the liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Chicken Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Cut the chicken into very small pieces and bruise the bones.

  2. Place the chicken in a stone jar with a tight cover.

  3. Set the jar in a large kettle of boiling water and boil for three hours.

Season and collect the jelly

  1. Strain the liquid and season with salt, pepper, and mace, or with sugar and lemon juice to taste.

  2. Return the chicken fragments to the jar and boil again in the kettle to collect more jelly.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Chicken
Releases gelatin and flavour into the liquid, which sets as the jelly.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice note to the seasoned jelly.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich jelly.

The step that matters

Boiling the jar in a kettle of water. Gentle, sustained heat from the surrounding water draws gelatin out of the bones and skin without boiling the liquid hard. Vigorous boiling inside the jar can make the jelly cloudy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, sugar, lemon):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, sugar, lemon. 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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