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Stewed Chicken and Dumplings

A stew of chicken, carrots, turnip, onion, and dumplings cooked in water with flour, chicken fat, salt, pepper, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Chicken and Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stew

  1. Wash the chicken and place it in a deep stew pan with 3 pints of water.

  2. Bring the stew to a boil.

Make the vegetable base

  1. In another saucepan, cook the carrot, turnip, and onion slowly for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the vegetables.

  3. Add the strained vegetables to the stew pan with the chicken.

  4. Mash the vegetables and rub them through the strainer into the pan.

  5. Skim 2 tablespoons of chicken fat from the stew.

  6. Add the skimmed chicken fat to the vegetable saucepan.

  7. When hot, stir in 3 tablespoons of flour.

Simmer and serve

  1. Simmer until the chicken is tender, about 2 hours.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and butter.

  3. Ten minutes before serving, add dumplings.

  4. Cook the dumplings for 10 minutes.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main meat and savory flavor that the broth carries.
Flour
Stirred into the hot fat to thicken the stew as it simmers.
Onion
Cooked into the vegetable base to add sweetness and aroma to the broth.
Carrot
Cooked and pureed into the stew, adding natural sweetness and body.
Turnip
Cooked and pureed into the stew, adding body and a mild earthy flavor.
Chicken fat
Heated and combined with flour, adding richness and helping to thicken the stew.

The step that matters

Stirring flour into the hot chicken fat. Flour must be cooked in hot fat to form a roux; if it is added to cold fat or liquid unevenly, it clumps and the stew thickens unevenly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

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