Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓
Soused Feet in Ragout
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the feet
Split the pig's feet in two.
Dredge the feet with flour.
Fry and stew
Fry the feet until they are a nice brown.
Thicken the gravy with brown flour and butter.
Stew the feet in the gravy for a few minutes.
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.
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Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Pig's feet
- Provide the main meat and gelatinous texture that the dish is built around.
- Flour
- Coats the feet for browning and thickens the gravy when cooked with butter.
- Butter
- Adds fat for frying and richness to the thickened gravy.
The step that matters
Fry the feet until they are a nice brown. Flour-dredged meat browns through the Maillard reaction, which builds deep savoury flavour. Pale frying produces a flat taste and a weaker base for the gravy.
“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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