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Bordelaise Sauce with Duck Croquettes

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Bordelaise Sauce with Duck Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Simmer the broth in a saucepan, skimming off the scum for half an hour.

  2. Strain the broth, let it cool, skim it, and thicken with flour and butter.

  3. Keep the sauce hot in a bain-marie.

  4. In a small saucepan, combine sauterne, minced onion, black pepper, and salt; boil until reduced by half.

  5. Strain the reduced liquid into the prepared sauce and simmer for 10 minutes.

  6. For the croquettes, mix saved duck meat with minced bacon, duck liver, and truffle or mushroom trimmings.

  7. Season the mixture with pepper, salt, and sage powder; bind with egg and form into egg-shaped balls.

  8. Coat the croquettes in bread crumbs and fry in hot fat until golden yellow.

  9. Serve the croquettes around a ring of mashed potatoes, filling the center with petits pois verts, and pour the hot Bordelaise sauce over them.

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. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  2. Onion + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

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

  3. Olive + breadtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,091 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Olive + sagetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,138 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, liver, truffle, olive, sage, egg, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, liver, truffle, olive, sage, egg, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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