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Fricassee of Chicken

A stew of chicken joints simmered with onions, parsley, lemon, and butter, finished with a creamy sauce of heavy cream and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Fricassee of Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Scald and skin the chicken joints.

  2. Place the chicken in a stewpan with onions, parsley, salt, pepper, lemon juice, butter, and water.

  3. Cover and stew for 1 hour over low heat.

Make the sauce

  1. Strain the gravy into a bowl.

  2. Gradually beat in the cream and egg yolks into the gravy.

  3. Heat the gravy gently, ensuring it does not boil.

Serve

  1. Pour the gravy over the fricassee before serving.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during slow stewing.
Egg yolks
Thicken the gravy into a smooth, rich sauce as they set gently with heat.
Heavy cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the gravy a silky, mellow texture.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour to the stewing liquid.
Onions
Release sweetness and aroma into the stewing liquid as they cook.

The step that matters

Heat the gravy gently, ensuring it does not boil. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat; if the gravy boils, the proteins scramble and the sauce curdles and turns grainy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, parsley, pepper, lemon, butter, cream, egg):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, parsley, pepper, lemon, butter, cream, egg. 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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