Skip to main content

Fifty Lunches

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Red wine and vinegar work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 575 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Fifty Lunches

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fill the moulds three-quarters full with custard.

  2. Steam gently until set.

  3. Once cold, turn them out onto a flat dish.

  4. Garnish with broken aspic and garden cress.

  5. Serve with mayonnaise made with plain red wine vinegar instead of tarragon.

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. Red wine + vinegartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together575 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  2. Garden cress + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together31 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Asparagus + garden cresstop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Asparagus + vinegartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together439 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

  5. Asparagus + red winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together38 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

Swap the garden cress

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (asparagus, red wine, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Rosemaryfits better
  4. Garden cressthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against asparagus, red wine, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like

Asparagus SoupAsparagus Soup179 recipesAsparagus SaladAsparagus Salad77 recipesCream of AsparagusCream of Asparagus38 recipesBoiled AsparagusBoiled Asparagus27 recipes