Name: Farc I Stuffing for Raised Pies
Ingredients: 1 pound fat bacon, cut into dice; 1½ pounds lean veal, poultry, or game; ¾ pound calf's liver, cut into dice; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; 12 chopped mushrooms

Why it works: Veal and liver match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 392 recipes. Both carry enoic acid, which smells butter, cheesy. The science ↓

Farc I Stuffing for Raised Pies

Ingredients

1 pound fat bacon, cut into dice
1½ pounds lean veal, poultry, or game
¾ pound calf's liver, cut into dice
pepper to taste
coarse sea salt to taste
12 chopped mushrooms

Directions

Fry the bacon in a stewpan until slightly browned.
Add the veal, poultry, or game, calf's liver, pepper, salt, and chopped mushrooms, then fry until the meat is cooked.
Pound the mixture in a mortar and then pass it through a wire sieve.

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.

Veal + livertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together392 recipes

Shared aroma: enoic acid (butter, cheesy).
Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Veal + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,446 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Liver + mushroomtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together572 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Veal + peppertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,049 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fat bacon: Renders fat into the pan that cooks the meats and adds savoury, browned flavour.
Lean veal, poultry, or game: Forms the main body of the stuffing, providing the meaty texture once cooked and pounded.
Calf's liver: Adds richness and a deeper, more distinctive meaty flavour to the stuffing.
Chopped mushrooms: Contribute moisture and earthy flavour as they cook down with the meats.

The step that matters

Pound the mixture and pass it through a sieve. Cooked meat and liver are fibrous and can be lumpy. Pounding breaks the fibres down and sieving removes remaining lumps, giving the smooth, even texture a stuffing needs.

“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.

Mushroom Soup60 recipes

Veal Patties50 recipes

Beef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipes

Tomato Soup526 recipes

Like knowing why a recipe works?

The free Flavor Lab newsletter: one surprising pairing a week and the molecular reason it works, in 60 seconds. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.

Prefer an account? Create a free account to save pairings and unlock the full chemistry.

Farc I Stuffing for Raised Pies