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Chicken Jelly

A gelatinous dish made by boiling chicken and its bones, then seasoning the broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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

Prepare

  1. Cut the chicken into pieces and pound the bones.

  2. Place the bones in a jar and cover it tightly.

Cook and finish

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

  2. Strain the liquid and add salt, pepper, sugar, and lemon juice.

  3. You can boil the fowl again to make 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. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

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

  5. Pepper + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 or old fowl
Provides the collagen and gelatin that set the broth into a jelly as it cools.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness of the jelly.
Loaf sugar
Adds a little sweetness that rounds out the savoury broth.

The step that matters

Covering the jar tightly while it boils. A tight seal keeps water out of the jar so the bones simmer in their own liquid. This concentrates the flavour and gelatin in the broth rather than diluting it.

“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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