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Sheeps' Trotters a LA Poulette

A stew of sheep trotters cooked slowly with lard, bacon, onion, carrot, cloves, garlic, pepper, salt, flour, lemon, vinegar, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 21 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic 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 ↓

Sheeps' Trotters a LA Poulette

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the trotters

  1. Remove the large bones from the cleaned trotters.

  2. Stew the trotters slowly in a mixture of hog's lard, bacon, onion, carrot, cloves, garlic, pepper, salt, flour, lemon slices, vinegar, and water for 5 hours. Ensure the bones can be easily removed.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pan, melt butter. Mix the melted butter with flour and stock.

  2. Add chopped onion, parsley, chives, salt, and pepper to the mixture. Add the trotters to this mixture. Let the trotters stew briefly.

Finish and serve

  1. Mix egg yolks with cream and vinegar or lemon juice. Add the mixture to the stew. Warm gently without boiling.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Sheep's trotters
Provide gelatinous collagen that softens during long stewing, giving body to the broth.
Hog's lard
Adds fat for richness and carries flavour through the long stew.
Bacon
Contributes smoky, savoury fat and flavour to the stew base.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the finished sauce when gently warmed with cream.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich fat and balances the sauce.

The step that matters

Warm gently without boiling. Egg yolks thicken at moderate heat but curdle and turn grainy if boiled, so the sauce must be heated slowly once the yolk mixture is added.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, clove, garlic, pepper, flour, vinegar):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, clove, garlic, pepper, flour, vinegar. 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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