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Calves' Feet En Fricassee

A sauce of browned butter, stock, mushrooms, and egg yolks served over cooked calves' feet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Calves' Feet En Fricassee

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan until browned.

  2. Add the stock and mushrooms, and bring to a boil.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the egg yolks.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the cooked calves' feet.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Mushroom + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Browns in the pan, adding a nutty flavour and richness to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Stirred in off the heat, they thicken the sauce and give it a silky, rich body.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that carries the other flavours.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks off the heat. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat. If the sauce is still boiling when they go in, the yolks can scramble and turn grainy instead of smooth and velvety.

“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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