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Stewed Chicken with Dumplings

A stew of chicken pieces and dumplings made with butter, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Stewed Chicken with Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Place chicken pieces and giblets in a stew pan and pour boiling water over them.

  2. Cover and cook until the chicken is tender.

  3. Add butter and flour, stirring to combine.

Make and cook the dumplings

  1. For dumplings, mix flour, lard, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add enough ice water to form a stiff dough.

  3. Roll the dough thin and cut into squares.

  4. Drop dumplings into the stew, stirring often to prevent sticking.

Serve

  1. Once cooked through, serve the chicken and dumplings on a deep platter.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and garnish with parsley.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Provides the meat and, as it cooks, the broth that flavours the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the stew, giving it a smoother mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the stew liquid as it is stirred in with the butter.
Lard
Tenderises the dumpling dough by shortening its gluten strands, keeping it light.

The step that matters

Stirring the dumplings into the stew. Dumplings are dense and sticky when they first hit hot liquid, so stirring often keeps them from clumping or sinking to the bottom and scorching. Stirring also helps them cook evenly through.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

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