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Chicken Jelly for Invalids

A gelatinous chicken broth set into a jelly, served cold or hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Chicken Jelly for Invalids

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blanch and scrape the chicken feet.

  2. Place the chicken in a casserole with cold water, pepper, and salt.

  3. Cover and seal the edges with a stiff flour and cold water paste.

Cook

  1. Stand the casserole in a deep saucepan with boiling water and gently boil for three hours.

Strain and cool

  1. Carefully remove the lid, stir, and strain through a fine piece of muslin.

  2. Let it cool and remove any fat.

Serve

  1. Serve in small quantities, either cold or hot.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Chicken + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Meat + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Flour and butter 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
Feet, neck and bones release gelatin that sets the liquid into aspic as it cools.
Flour
Makes a stiff paste that seals the casserole lid so steam and flavour stay inside.

The step that matters

Gently boil for three hours in the water bath. A gentle, steady simmer slowly draws gelatin from the chicken without breaking up the fat and proteins, which keeps the liquid clear and firm when it sets. A hard boil would make it cloudy and greasy.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

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