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Chicken Fricassee

Chicken Fricassee is a chicken dish cooked in béchamel sauce with cream, egg, lemon, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Chicken Fricassee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the chicken into neat joints while it is still warm.

  2. Prepare the béchamel sauce as directed.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the chicken pieces to the sauce and heat until thoroughly hot.

  2. Blend the egg and cream or milk, then stir into the sauce by the fire until it thickens, without boiling.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Arrange the chicken on a hot dish and strain the sauce over it.

  2. Garnish with truffles, cooked green peas, or croutons of fried bread, and serve with a border of mashed potatoes if desired.

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. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Cream + peppertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Cream + eggtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Egg
Thickens the sauce when gently heated, giving it a smooth, rich body.
Cream or milk
Adds moisture and richness, softening the sauce and mellowing its flavour.
Béchamel sauce
Forms the base of the dish, coating the chicken in a smooth white sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances its creaminess.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce without boiling. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat, but if the sauce boils the egg can scramble and curdle, leaving the sauce grainy and thin instead of smooth.

“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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