Name: Aspic Jelly
Ingredients: 1 fine lobster; Salt to taste; Pepper to taste; Lemon juice to taste; French butter; Aspic jelly; Truffles; Whites of eggs; Rice

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Aspic Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Remove the flesh from the lobster and cut it into scallops. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.
Spread a layer of French butter on a flat baking tin and freeze it. Cut out scallops from the frozen butter using a paste cutter.
Repeat the process with the lobster butter.
In a mould, fill the bottom with aspic jelly and decorate with truffles and egg whites.
Layer the mould with alternating rounds of lobster scallops and butter: start with lobster, then French butter, repeat, and finish with alternating scallops of lobster and lobster butter.
Separate each layer with a layer of jelly and set the mould on ice after each layer to firm it up.
Finish with a layer of jelly on top. Once set, turn out of the mould.
For the rice base, wash and boil rice in salted water, covering the saucepan to allow the rice to burst. Simmer gently.
Pound the cooked rice and place it in a narrow oval mould. Once cold, turn it out and cover with French butter for color.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + truffletop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,209 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Pepper + ricetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,379 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,366 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).
Butter + ricetop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,645 recipes

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