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A Delicious Dish

A half-roasted capon served with herbs, pine nuts, honey, saffron, and seasoned with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 1,445 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, tree nuts (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare

  1. Put the cow's milk into a pot.

  2. Chop the parsley, sage, hyssop, and savory.

Make the herb milk

  1. Stew the chopped herbs in the milk.

Finish the capons

  1. Cut the half-roasted capons into pieces.

  2. Add the pine nuts and clarified honey to the capons.

  3. Season the dish with salt.

  4. Add saffron for color 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Parsley + sagetop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,445 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + saffrontop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Sage + pinetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together61 recipes

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

  4. Pine + saffrontop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together41 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Milk + honeytop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,333 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Capons
Form the main body of the dish, supplying the meat.
Clarified honey
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown.
Pine nuts
Add fat and a rich, nutty flavor.
Cows milk
Forms a creamy base that carries the herb flavor.
Parsley, sage, hyssop, savory
Provide the main aromatic character of the dish.

Flavor stand-ins for the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, parsley, sage, pine, honey, saffron):

  1. Walnutbetter flavor fit
  2. Pistachiobetter flavor fit
  3. Almondbetter flavor fit
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, parsley, sage, pine, honey, saffron. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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