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Rocky Mountain Stock

A savory stock made with butter, flour, meat, eggs, lemon, and optional sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Rocky Mountain Stock

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pot, brown the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and gradually stir in the stock.

  3. Season with salt and pepper as needed.

  4. Add the diced cooked meat, hard-boiled egg slices or yolk balls, lemon juice, and lemon rind.

  5. Stir in the sherry if using.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

Butter
Browns in the pot to add a nutty, rich flavor to the base.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, lightly body-filled broth when mixed with butter.
Cooked meat
Adds savory substance and bulk to the soup.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and body, giving the soup substance.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the savory flavors.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the browned butter. Flour must be cooked briefly in the fat before stock is added; otherwise it stays raw-tasting and can form lumps when the liquid goes in.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, meat, egg, sherry, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Plumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, meat, egg, sherry, pepper. 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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