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Menu for a Party of Eight

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 25 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Menu for a Party of Eight

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare quenelles by placing a piece of truffle inside each one.

  2. Boil equal portions of carrot, peas, turnip, French beans, and cucumber; cut into dice.

  3. Heat the diced vegetables in a white sauce made from their boiling water and enriched with chicken broth flavored with almond.

  4. Make savory rice by mixing boiled rice with coarse sea salt, a little spice, tomato pulp, and finely grated cheese, stirred with melted butter and firmed with egg yolks.

  5. Form the rice mixture into a circle in a silver dish, brush with egg, coat with bread crumbs, and brown slightly in the oven.

  6. Poach the quenelles carefully and arrange them around the rice, pouring the vegetable mixture into the center.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + beanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Turnip + cucumbertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together226 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Beans + cucumbertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together602 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 peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (truffle, carrot, turnip, beans, cucumber, sauce, chicken):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Chickpeafits about as well
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against truffle, carrot, turnip, beans, cucumber, sauce, chicken. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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