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Chili Colorado

A chicken stew flavored with pepper pods, parsley, onions, butter, flour, and salt, served hot with a rice border.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper 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 ↓

Chili Colorado

Ingredients

Directions

Make the chili

  1. Cut the chickens as for stewing and cook in water to cover until about half done.

  2. Add parsley and onions.

  3. Remove seeds from pepper pods, pour boiling water over them, and let steam for 10-15 minutes.

  4. Pour off the water and rub the peppers through a sieve to extract the juice.

  5. Add the juice to the chicken and cook for about 30 minutes.

  6. Add a small piece of butter, flour to thicken, and a little salt.

Serve

  1. Serve the chili hot in a dish with a border of cooked rice around the edge.

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

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

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

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

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Chickens
Provide the main body of the stew, becoming tender as they cook slowly in water.
Pepper pods
Supply the heat and pepper flavor, with their juice carrying the seasoning through the stew.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a looser sauce that clings to the chicken.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Rubbing the steamed peppers through a sieve. Steaming softens the pod walls so the juice can be pressed out. Pouring off the soaking water too late or sieving unevenly leaves the sauce thin or gritty, so the flavor and texture of the chili suffer.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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