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To Send a Dinner to Table All in Nice Order and Thoroughly Well Cooked

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and broccoli match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 910 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Send a Dinner to Table All in Nice Order and Thoroughly Well Cooked

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Make the plum pudding in the morning.

  2. Prepare the soup, reserving thickening and wine addition for later.

  3. Cook the boiled fish for 20 minutes before serving.

  4. Roast the beef according to your preferred method.

  5. Boil the potatoes and steam or boil the broccoli just 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. Potato + broccolitop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together910 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Plum + broccolitop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together67 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Plum + potatotop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methyl-1-butanol (fusel, malty).

  5. Fish + beeftop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together226 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, beef, potato, broccoli):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, beef, potato, broccoli. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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