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Sauce

Truffles Saute Metropole

A sauté of truffles with bacon, carrots, turnips, onions, herbs, stock, and champagne, finished with mace, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Truffles Saute Metropole

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Line a sauté pan with thin slices of fat bacon.

  2. Add slices of carrots, turnips, onions, bay leaf, parsley, cloves, and thyme.

  3. Add large peeled truffles and moisten with white stock and champagne.

  4. Cover and let simmer for 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the truffles from the pan.

  2. Place the truffles on a croustade of bread.

  3. Reduce the cooking liquid, then skim off the fat.

  4. Strain the liquid over the truffles.

  5. Season the truffles with ground mace, pepper, and coarse sea salt before serving.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Truffles
Are the main ingredient, cooked gently so they become tender and take on the flavour of the braising liquid.
Fat bacon
Lines the pan and releases fat and savoury flavour into the liquid as it cooks.
White stock
Provides the moist cooking liquid that gently braises the truffles and later becomes the sauce.
Champagne
Adds acidity and aromatic flavour to the cooking liquid, lifting the savoury notes.

The step that matters

Simmering gently with a cover. A covered, gentle simmer keeps the truffles moist and tender while the liquid slowly extracts flavour. A hard boil would toughen the truffles and reduce the liquid too quickly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, parsley, clove, thyme, truffle, champagne):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, parsley, clove, thyme, truffle, champagne. 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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