Name: Minced Meat for Pâté De Foie Gras
Ingredients: 1 calf's liver, diced; 1 shallot; 2 tablespoons fat bacon; 1 clove garlic; 1 onion; trimmings of truffles (optional); cold veal or white breast-meat of cold roast chicken (if veal is unavailable)

Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Minced Meat for Pâté De Foie Gras

Ingredients

Directions

Melt the bacon in a frying pan and rub the pan with garlic.
Add the diced calf's liver and minced onion to the pan and fry until cooked.
Set the mixture aside to cool.
Pound the cooled mixture in a mortar with cold veal or chicken breast.
If using, add minced truffle trimmings to the mixture 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together29,058 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Liver + vealtop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together392 recipes

Shared aroma: enoic acid (butter, cheesy).
Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,000 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,677 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Shallot + oniontop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,431 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Calf's liver: Forms the main body of the pâté, giving it a rich, smooth texture when pounded.
Bacon fat: Adds fat and savory flavor while frying, keeping the mixture moist.
Cold veal or chicken breast: Adds lean meat that gives the pâté more body and a firmer texture.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, shallot, garlic, onion, truffle, veal):

Capersfits better
Thymefits better
Parsleyfits better
Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, shallot, garlic, onion, truffle, veal. 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.