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Chicken Souffle

A baked chicken dish with cream sauce, buttered breadcrumbs, and separated white and dark meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chicken Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken in just enough water to cover it until tender.

  2. Add a little coarse sea salt to the water.

  3. Let the chicken cool in the water.

  4. Once cold, remove all the meat from the bones.

  5. Chop the meat, keeping white and dark meat separate.

  6. Chop the dark meat finer than the white meat.

Make the cream sauce

  1. To make the cream sauce, rub 2 tablespoons of flour into 2 tablespoons of butter.

  2. Stir the butter and flour mixture into 1 pint of scalding milk.

  3. Cook the sauce thoroughly.

  4. Season well with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  5. Add more butter when partly cold.

Assemble and bake

  1. Add one cup of cream sauce to each cup of chicken.

  2. Mix the chicken and cream sauce well.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a serving dish.

  4. Cover the mixture with buttered bread crumbs.

  5. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until brown, about twenty 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.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the bulk of the soufflé and its savory meaty flavor.
Flour
Thickens the milk with butter into a smooth sauce that holds the chicken together.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the sauce and helps the topping brown.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream sauce, giving it body and softness.

The step that matters

Cook the sauce thoroughly. Flour must be cooked in the hot milk and butter until the sauce thickens and loses its raw starchy taste. Undercooked flour leaves a pasty flavor and weak thickening.

“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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