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Menu for a Party of Eight

A truffle and Madeira glaze served with aspic and toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lime and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,621 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Menu for a Party of Eight

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the truffle glaze

  1. Slice the truffles.

  2. Toss the truffles in a frying pan with butter and Madeira.

  3. Let the truffles simmer.

  4. Pour the contents into a sauce.

  5. Stir in red currant jelly, Madeira, and lime juice, reducing to a firm glaze.

  6. Set the glaze aside to cool.

Set the aspic mold

  1. Decorate a border mold with hard boiled egg, gherkins, and olives.

  2. Fill the border mold with aspic jelly.

  3. Refrigerate the border mold.

  4. Turn out the jelly border.

Assemble and serve

  1. Fill the center with layers of glazed fillets and truffle pieces.

  2. Keep the dish in ice until serving.

  3. Serve with crisp dry toast.

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. Lime + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,621 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Red currant + limetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together59 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Truffle + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Red currant + olivetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together114 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Truffle + olivetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Truffles
Provide the main aroma and flavor of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the truffle flavor when the truffles are tossed in the pan.
Red currant jelly
Adds sweetness and body, helping the glaze set firm as it reduces.
Aspic jelly
Sets into a clear gelatin that holds the border and encloses the garnishes.

The step that matters

Reducing the glaze to a firm glaze. If the glaze is not reduced enough, it stays too loose to set firmly once cooled. Gelatin-based aspic also needs to be kept cold to hold its shape.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (truffle, butter, red currant, egg, olive):

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Pumpkinfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against truffle, butter, red currant, egg, olive. 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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