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Consommé De Volaille À LA Martinière

A chicken consommé served with layered stuffed lettuce, toasted bread, and parmesan, garnished with chervil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 396 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Consommé De Volaille À LA Martinière

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Keep 2 liters of chicken consommé warm on the side of the fire.

  2. Prepare stuffed lettuce and let it drain well.

  3. Unwrap the stuffed lettuce and cut it into thick slices.

Layer and gratin

  1. Layer the slices in a dish, alternating with thin slices of toasted bread and grated parmesan.

  2. Drizzle a little broth over the layers and sprinkle more parmesan on top.

  3. Gratin in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) for 10 to 12 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the warm consommé in a soup tureen and garnish with fresh chervil.

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. Lettuce + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

  3. Lettuce + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Chicken + lettucetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,421 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Bread + cherviltop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together99 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Stuffed lettuce
Forms the main body of the dish, with its filling giving richness and substance to each slice.
Grated parmesan
Melts and browns during gratinating, adding savoury flavour and a golden crust.
Toasted bread
Soaks up broth and adds a crisp, dry texture between the layers.
Chicken consommé
Clear, flavourful liquid base that is served hot around the gratinated layers.

The step that matters

Gratin in a slow oven. Baking at a moderate heat for a short time warms the layers and melts the cheese without drying the lettuce or scorching the parmesan, which browns quickly.

Swap the chervil

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, lettuce, bread):

  1. Chervilthe original
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Tarragonfits less well
  4. Garlicfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, lettuce, bread. 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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