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Stewed Prairie Chickens

A stew of prairie chickens cooked slowly with stock, gravy, lemon, cloves, pepper, salt, tomato sauce, and thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Stewed Prairie Chickens

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Prepare the chickens as you would for roasting.

  2. Place them in a stew pan with stock or water and cold gravy.

  3. Add lemon juice, cloves, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  4. After a while, stir in a few tablespoons of tomato sauce.

  5. Stew slowly for about two hours.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add a little tomato ketchup to the sauce.

  2. Thicken the sauce with butter and flour.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Chicken + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,031 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Prairie chickens
Provide the main meat that becomes tender during slow stewing.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with butter.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and works with flour to thicken it.
Tomato sauce
Adds acidity and savoury depth to the stewing liquid.
Cold gravy
Adds body and savoury richness to the stew liquid.

The step that matters

Stewing slowly for about two hours. Gentle, long simmering breaks down the connective tissue in game birds, making the meat tender. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and make the sauce cloudy or uneven.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, lemon, pepper, tomato, sauce, butter, flour):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, lemon, pepper, tomato, sauce, butter, flour. 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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