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A Vegetable Rarity

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and bread match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and 22,584 recipes mention both. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

  1. Strip off the loose outer leaves from the Brussels sprouts.

  2. Drop them, a few at a time, into a large pot of fast boiling water with coarse sea salt.

  3. Boil hard for 10 to 15 minutes.

  4. Place in a colander and shake slightly to drain excess moisture.

  5. When cool, dip in the beaten egg yolk and roll in bread crumbs.

  6. Fry a dozen at a time in boiling oil until golden.

  7. Drain thoroughly and serve piled in a pyramid on a very hot dish.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Egg + breadtop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together22,584 recipes

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

  2. Brussels sprouts + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Brussels sprouts + breadtop 73% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together0 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-3-hexenol (green, grassy).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the brussels sprouts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, bread):

  1. Asparagusbetter flavor fit
  2. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  3. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  4. Brussels sproutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

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