Name: Farce Stuffing for Raised Pies
Ingredients: 1 pound fat bacon, cut into dice; 1½ pounds lean veal, poultry, or game, cut into dice; ¾ pound calf's liver, cut into dice; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; 12 chopped mushrooms

Why it works: Veal and liver match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 392 recipes. Both carry enoic acid, which smells butter, cheesy. The science ↓

Farce Stuffing for Raised Pies

Ingredients

1 pound fat bacon, cut into dice
1½ pounds lean veal, poultry, or game, cut into dice
¾ pound calf's liver, cut into dice
pepper to taste
coarse sea salt to taste
12 chopped mushrooms

Directions

In a stewpan, fry the diced bacon until slightly browned.
Add the diced veal, poultry, or game, calf's liver, pepper, salt, and chopped mushrooms.
Fry until the meat is cooked through.
Pound the mixture in a mortar and then pass it through a wire sieve.

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.

Veal + livertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together392 recipes

Shared aroma: enoic acid (butter, cheesy).
Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Veal + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,446 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Liver + mushroomtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together572 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Veal + peppertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,049 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fat bacon: Renders fat that cooks the meats and adds savoury flavour to the stuffing.
Lean veal, poultry, or game: Forms the main body of the stuffing, giving it substance and texture once cooked.
Calf's liver: Adds richness and a deeper, more savoury flavour to the mixture.
Mushrooms: Add moisture and earthy flavour as they release liquid while frying.

The step that matters

Fry until the meat is cooked through. Undercooked meat and liver can carry food-safety risks, and the mixture must be fully cooked before it is pounded and sieved into a smooth stuffing.

“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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Farce Stuffing for Raised Pies