Name: Timbale À l’Indienne
Ingredients: ½ pound macaroni; saffron (for coloring); force-meat of poultry; ragout à l’Indienne (cocks’-combs, stones, fat liver, mushrooms, small pieces of lean bacon); very pale velouté sauce (made with jelly broth of poultry, flavored with mushrooms, cayenne pepper, and pimento)

Why it works: Saffron and pepper work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 781 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Timbale À l’Indienne

Ingredients

½ pound macaroni
saffron (for coloring)
force-meat of poultry
ragout à l’Indienne (cocks’-combs, stones, fat liver, mushrooms, small pieces of lean bacon)
very pale velouté sauce (made with jelly broth of poultry, flavored with mushrooms, cayenne pepper, and pimento)

Directions

Boil ½ pound of macaroni in two separate pots, adding saffron to one for color.
Drain each portion of macaroni separately.
In a mold, place a strip of white macaroni around the bottom.
Cover the bottom with alternating strips of yellow and white macaroni.
Add a second layer of yellow macaroni around the mold, followed by white, continuing until the top.
Mask the bottom and sides of the mold with force-meat of poultry.
Pour in the ragout à l’Indienne and finish the timbale as directed.

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.

Saffron + peppertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together781 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Meat + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,423 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Saffron + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together57 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Liver + mushroomtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together572 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Swap the saffron

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, liver, mushroom, sauce, pepper):

Thymefits better
Parsleyfits better
Marjoramfits better
Saffronthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, liver, mushroom, sauce, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.