Skip to main content
Main

Fricassee of Chicken

A stew of chicken joints simmered in a cream and egg yolk sauce with onion, cloves, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Fricassee of Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Parboil the chickens until you can cut them into joints.

  2. Remove the lungs from the chickens.

  3. Place the joints in cold water.

Make the broth

  1. In the parboiling water, add the necks, legs, and any other unused parts, along with the chopped onion, cloves, and ground mace.

  2. Boil slowly for 1 hour.

  3. Strain the broth.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken the broth with the cream, flour, egg yolks, and salt mixed together.

  2. Warm the chicken joints in the thickened sauce for 5 minutes.

  3. Garnish with lemon slices, avoiding the juice to prevent curdling.

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. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Clove + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 is cut into joints and simmered in the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce, making it smooth and velvety.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the broth into a sauce by swelling with heat and binding liquid.
Egg yolks
Thicken the cream sauce as they set gently with heat and add richness.
Ground mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the broth.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce gently. Egg yolks can curdle and turn grainy if the sauce boils after they are added. Keep the heat low and stir constantly so the yolks thicken the sauce smoothly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, onion, clove, cream, flour, egg, lemon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, clove, cream, flour, egg, 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.

More chicken fricassee recipes

with Mushrooms 6White 6Cold 4with Tomato Sauce 3 See all 369 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes