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Ratatouille a LA Creole

A Creole stew of veal, ham, sweet potatoes, onions, tomatoes, okra, and spices, simmered slowly until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Ratatouille a LA Creole

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Brown the veal bones and trimmings in butter in a frying pan or roast them in the oven until browned.

  2. Place the browned bones in a saucepan with garlic, thyme, tomatoes, and a little boiling water, starting with 3 pints of liquid.

  3. Fry the onions in butter until browned.

  4. Add the browned onions to the saucepan, cover, and let stew gently for 2 hours.

  5. Strain the gravy and return it to the saucepan.

Make the stew

  1. Fry the veal pieces in butter until nicely browned.

  2. Add the browned veal pieces, diced ham, sweet potatoes, salt, and pepper to the saucepan.

  3. If available, add half a sweet pepper, chopped.

  4. Stew gently until the veal is tender and the sweet potatoes are almost melting, about 1.5 to 2 hours.

  5. Ten minutes before finishing, add the can of okra.

  6. If using fresh okra, add it 30 minutes before removing from heat.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat in the center of a platter.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Garlic + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,608 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Thyme + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Browning the pieces builds flavor, and slow stewing makes the meat tender.
Veal bones
Browning and simmering them builds a rich, savory gravy base.
Onions
Browning the onions adds sweetness and depth to the gravy.
Sweet potatoes
Long stewing softens them until they thicken and enrich the sauce.
Okra
Cooking releases its natural thickening, giving the stew body.
Tomatoes
Provide acidity and liquid that balance the rich, fatty meat.

The step that matters

Browning the veal pieces. Searing in butter until nicely browned creates Maillard flavors that stewing alone cannot produce, so the pieces should get real colour before they go into the liquid.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, clove, garlic, ham, onion, thyme, tomato):

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, clove, garlic, ham, onion, thyme, tomato. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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