Name: Duchess Timbales
Ingredients: truffles; foies-gras; artichoke bottoms; olives; financiere sauce; pistachios; beef tongue; quenelle chicken forcemeat

Why it works: Artichoke and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 745 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Duchess Timbales

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare a salpicon by mixing chopped truffles, foies-gras, artichoke bottoms, and sliced olives with reduced financiere sauce. Let it cool.
Decorate the bottom of a mold with a ring of truffle and fill the space with chopped pistachios.
Arrange ten small round pieces of beef tongue along the lower edge of the mold.
Set bands of truffle vertically from the beef tongue to the top of the mold.
Garnish the bottom and sides with quenelle chicken forcemeat and place a ball of salpicon in the center.
Cover with more forcemeat.

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.

Artichoke + olivetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together745 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Artichoke + pistachiotop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Beef + chickentop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,148 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Olive + pistachiotop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together299 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Olive + chickentop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,888 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid hexyl ester (sweet, green).

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

Swap the pistachio

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (truffle, artichoke, olive, sauce, beef, chicken):

Beansfits better
Lentilsfits better
Chestnutfits better
Pistachiothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against truffle, artichoke, olive, sauce, beef, chicken. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.