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Imitation Terrapin

A cold meat dish mixed with egg yolks, wine, walnut catsup, mustard, and butter, topped with rolled egg yolks and garnished with lemon and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Imitation Terrapin

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the cold chicken, mutton, or veal into small pieces.

  2. Sprinkle with cayenne pepper and salt.

Make the sauce

  1. Mash the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs and mix with a little wine, walnut catsup, mustard, and butter in a stew-pan for five minutes.

Assemble and serve

  1. Take the yolk from the fourth hard-boiled egg, roll it into small balls like terrapin eggs, and scatter them in the dish.

  2. Garnish with lemon slices and parsley before serving.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Walnut + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  5. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold chicken, mutton, or veal
Provides the main meat body of the dish, which is cut into small pieces.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks are mashed into a rich, thick base that binds the sauce together.
Walnut catsup
Adds a dark, savoury, tangy flavour to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth texture to the mashed yolk mixture.

The step that matters

Mashing and heating the yolk sauce. Heating the mashed yolks with butter and wine for five minutes lets them thicken into a smooth sauce; if overheated, egg yolk can curdle and turn grainy.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, egg, wine, mustard, butter, lemon):

  1. Sesamefits about as well
  2. Beansfits about as well
  3. Chickpeafits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, egg, wine, mustard, butter, lemon. 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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