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Dinner for 8 Persons

A dinner menu eight, featuring calf head soup, cod, eels, mutton kidneys, sweetbreads, goose, partridges, fruit jelly, Italian cream, pears, apple tart, and cabinet pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 649 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Dinner for 8 Persons

serves 8

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare the calf's head soup.

  2. Cook the crimped cod and serve with oyster sauce.

  3. Stew the eels.

  4. Prepare the mutton kidneys and sweetbreads as entrees.

  5. Boil the leg of mutton and garnish with carrots and turnips.

  6. Roast the goose.

  7. Serve partridges as the third course.

  8. Prepare fruit jelly, Italian cream, and vol-au-vent of pears.

  9. Bake the apple tart and cabinet pudding for 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. Pear + appletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together649 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Carrot + peartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together74 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Carrot + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together680 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs (in the method)
Not applicable; no eggs are listed in this record.
Mutton
Boiled leg of mutton is the main roast-style centrepiece for the table.

Swap the pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, sauce, mutton, carrot, turnip, cream, apple):

  1. Pearthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Peachfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, sauce, mutton, carrot, turnip, cream, apple. 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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