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Chicken Fricassee

A stew of chicken pieces simmered in broth and milk, thickened with a white sauce and seasoned with salt, pepper, celery salt, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 the chicken

  1. Clean the chicken and cut it into serving pieces at the joints.

  2. Cover the chicken with boiling water, add salt and pepper, and simmer until the meat is tender.

  3. Remove the large bones and return them to the water to cook again.

Brown and make the sauce

  1. Dredge the meat in flour and brown it in hot dripping.

  2. Place the browned chicken on toast on a hot dish.

  3. Strain the broth and remove the fat.

  4. In a saucepan, combine the chicken broth and milk.

  5. Thicken the mixture with flour cooked in butter, as you would for a white sauce.

  6. Season with additional salt, pepper, celery salt, and lemon juice to taste.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Provides the main protein; simmering until tender makes the meat soft and easy to eat.
Flour
Coats the meat for browning and, cooked in butter, thickens the sauce into a smooth white sauce.
Milk
Adds richness and body to the sauce along with the broth.
Chicken broth
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries its savory flavor.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor to the flour roux that thickens the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with flour cooked in butter. Flour must be cooked in butter before the liquid is added, so the starch swells evenly and the sauce thickens smoothly without a raw floury taste or lumps.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Celerythe original

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