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An Impromptu HunNTERS’ Lunch

A lunch featuring oysters, ham, turkey, chicken, partridges, biscuits, salad, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

An Impromptu HunNTERS’ Lunch

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove gills from oysters and serve on the half-shell with lemon slices.

  2. Prepare a salad with your choice of ingredients.

  3. Roll out the dough for biscuits and bake until golden.

  4. Arrange the home-cured ham, cold turkey, cold chicken, and partridges on a serving platter.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Turkey + chickentop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together688 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-decenal (green, must).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Turkey + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together281 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

Oysters
Serve raw as the fresh, briny centrepiece of the spread.
Flour
Forms the structure of the biscuit dough, setting firm as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat that keeps biscuits tender and promotes golden browning.
Milk
Hydrates the flour into dough and adds moisture and browning in the biscuits.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, ham, turkey, chicken, flour, butter, milk):

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Grapefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, ham, turkey, chicken, flour, butter, milk. 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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