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Imrections for Dinner and Evening Parties

A menu of dishes for dinner and evening parties, including soup, fish, ham, turkey, oysters, ducks, vegetables, pastry, pudding, fruit, and coffee.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Imrections for Dinner and Evening Parties

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare ahead

  1. Prepare the soup and boil it down the day before the dinner party.

  2. Purchase all ingredients from the market on the morning of the dinner.

  3. Bake the pastry the day before and prepare the pudding.

Cook the menu

  1. Boil the ham and turkey, serving the turkey with oyster sauce.

  2. Roast the ducks and prepare the scalloped oysters.

  3. Cook the potatoes, parsnips, turnips, and celery.

Serve

  1. Serve fruit and coffee as dessert.

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. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + parsniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together353 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Potato + turniptop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Fish + oystertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together496 recipes

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

  5. Ham + oystertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Soup
Boiling it down the day before concentrates its flavour for the meal.
Oyster sauce
Adds a salty, savoury flavour to the turkey.
Pastry
Baked the day before, it provides a crisp, sturdy base for the pudding.

Swap the parsnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, ham, turkey, oyster, sauce, potato, turnip):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, ham, turkey, oyster, sauce, potato, turnip. 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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