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Truffles Au Naturel

Baked truffles seasoned with parsley, garlic, mace, pepper, sea salt, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Truffles Au Naturel

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and brush the truffles.

  2. Cut them into thin slices.

Bake and serve

  1. Place them in a baking dish with oil, pepper, coarse sea salt, parsley, garlic, and mace.

  2. Bake for nearly 1 hour.

  3. Just before serving, add the lemon juice.

  4. Serve very hot.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  4. Parsley + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

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

  5. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 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 main flavour and aroma of the dish.
Oil
Carries heat evenly around the truffle slices and keeps them moist while baking.
Lemon juice
Adds a bright acidity that lifts the rich, earthy flavour of the truffles.

The step that matters

Just before serving, add the lemon juice.. Acid is volatile and its fresh brightness fades with prolonged heat, so adding it at the end keeps the lemon flavour clear rather than cooked out.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (truffle, parsley, garlic, lemon, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against truffle, parsley, garlic, lemon, 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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