Name: Modern Cookery
Ingredients: 1 fowl or bird; butter; salt; pepper; clarified butter; oil or butter

Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Cut the fowl or bird in half before broiling.
Lay the inside of the bird to the fire first.
Wrap fish in a thickly buttered sheet of wrapping paper before grilling.
For delicate-skinned fish, rub the grill bars with chalk instead of butter.

Season and cook

Season cutlets with salt and pepper, then dip in clarified butter or sprinkle it on.
Cook steaks or cutlets with lighted paper in a cooking apparatus called a conjurer for 8-10 minutes, turning occasionally.

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.

Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl or bird: Is the main protein that is cut and broiled whole in halves.
Butter: Adds richness and helps keep the surface from sticking and drying during grilling.
Clarified butter: Coats the cutlets with pure fat, adding richness and promoting even browning.

“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.