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To Dress Sucking Pig En Blanquette

A sauce of butter, mushrooms, herbs, veal broth, white wine, egg yolks, and lemon juice served over sliced roasted pig.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Dress Sucking Pig En Blanquette

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pig

  1. Remove the skin from the cold roasted pig and cut the meat into small, neat slices.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and add the sliced mushrooms, parsley, sweet herbs, garlic, mace, salt, and Cayenne pepper.

  2. Dredge a little flour over the mixture and shake over the heat for 2-3 minutes.

  3. Add the veal broth and white wine, then simmer gently until reduced by half.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the herbs and add the meat, beaten egg yolks, and lemon juice.

  2. Heat the mixture without boiling, then serve in the sauce.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Mushroom + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,700 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold roasted pig
Supplies the meat, which is cut into slices and heated in the sauce.
Butter
Fat that cooks the mushrooms and herbs and carries their flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it is shaken over the heat with the butter.
Veal broth
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which reduces to concentrate its flavour.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce gently when heated without boiling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture without boiling. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heating; if the sauce boils, the proteins scramble and the sauce turns grainy and curdled.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, mushroom, parsley, clove, garlic, pepper, flour):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mushroom, parsley, clove, garlic, pepper, flour. 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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