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Dinner for 18 Persons

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 29 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 734 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Dinner for 18 Persons

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare green pea soup and rice soup as the first course.

  2. Serve salmon and lobster sauce alongside trout and whitebait.

  3. For the entrees, serve lamb cutlets with cucumbers, fricasseed chicken, and stewed veal with peas.

  4. For the second course, roast a quarter lamb and serve with spinach, fillet of beef, boiled fowls, braised shoulder of lamb, tongue, and assorted vegetables.

  5. For the third course, serve goslings, ducklings, Nesselrode pudding, Charlotte à la Parisienne, gooseberry tartlets, strawberry cream, raspberry and currant tart, custards, dessert, and ices.

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. Rice + cucumbertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together734 recipes

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

  2. Rice + chickentop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Lamb + chickentop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Lobster + saucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Rice + lambtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together439 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, salmon, lobster, sauce, lamb, chicken, veal):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, salmon, lobster, sauce, lamb, chicken, veal. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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