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Chicken Terrapin No. 1

A creamy chicken sauce made with butter, flour, milk, and sherry, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Chicken Terrapin No. 1

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cream the butter and flour together in a saucepan.

  2. Add salt, pepper, and cayenne; cook until grainy.

  3. Stir in the milk (or milk and chicken broth) and cook until thick and creamy.

Season and serve

  1. Add the chicken, sherry, and nutmeg; mix well.

  2. Let it stand hot for 10-15 minutes to season.

  3. Serve hot in paper or pastry shells or on plates.

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

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

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + chickentop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and adds a rich flavour to the base.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, creamy sauce when cooked with the butter.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it cooks.
Cooked chicken
Provides the main protein and bulk of the dish.
Sherry wine
Adds a mildly sweet, aromatic flavour to the creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the milk until thick and creamy. Flour needs enough heat and stirring to swell and gelatinise its starch. If the sauce is undercooked it stays thin and tastes floury, and if it scorches on the pan bottom it turns bitter. Stir steadily while it cooks.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Rosemaryfits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

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