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Ragout Powder

A powdered spice blend of truffles, dried mushrooms, citrus peels, spices, and sea salt for ragout.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Ragout Powder

Ingredients

Directions

Make the powder

  1. Dry the truffles, mushrooms, lemon peel, orange peel, nutmeg, mace, black pepper, and cayenne over a fire.

  2. Pound the dried ingredients to a fine powder.

  3. Add the coarse sea salt and sift the mixture through a sieve.

Store

  1. Store the powder in a bottle for future use.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Truffle + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,900 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Truffles
Provide the powder's concentrated, earthy, aromatic flavour.
Dried mushrooms
Add savoury, umami depth through their concentrated flavour.
Mace
Contributes warm, aromatic spice notes to the blend.
Black pepper
Adds sharp, pungent heat and aroma to the blend.
Cayenne
Adds direct, lingering heat to the blend.

The step that matters

Drying the ingredients over a fire. Thorough drying removes moisture so the ingredients can be pounded to a fine powder and will keep without spoiling. Under-dried ingredients stay damp, clump when pounded, and are more likely to spoil in storage.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (truffle, mushroom, lemon, orange, nutmeg, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against truffle, mushroom, lemon, orange, nutmeg, pepper. 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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