Name: Menu for a Party of Eight
Ingredients: 8 fat quails; 4 sheep’s tongues; ½ pound lamb’s liver; 2 pounds gravy meat; 2 tablespoons butter; 2 teaspoons sugar; 1 teaspoon coarse sea salt; spiced pepper

Why it works: Quail and lamb share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Menu for a Party of Eight

serves 8

Ingredients

Directions

Make gravy sauce with the gravy meat.
Stew the sheep’s tongues in the gravy.
Bone the quails and add the bones to the gravy.
Trim the cold sheep’s tongues and cut 8 fillets the size of a walnut.
Dust the boned quails with spiced pepper.

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.

Quail + lambtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together28 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Lamb + peppertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,165 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Lamb + meattop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together469 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Quail + meattop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together48 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).
Quail + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together512 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Quails: Provide the main meat of the dish, served boned and lightly seasoned.
Sheep’s tongues: Provide tender meat that is stewed in the gravy, then trimmed and cut into fillets.
Gravy meat: Gives the base for the gravy sauce, which carries the flavor of the dish.

“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.