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Vegetable Marrow, Stuffed

Stuffed vegetable marrow filled with minced meat, flour, onion, and egg, then stewed in stock and topped with a thickened egg yolk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,814 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Vegetable Marrow, Stuffed

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Cut the vegetable marrow in half lengthwise and remove the seeds.

  2. In a bowl, mix the minced meat with flour, pepper, salt, onion, and egg yolk.

Stuff and stew

  1. Fill the marrow halves with the mixture and tie them securely with thread.

  2. Stew the stuffed marrow in well-flavored stock until soft.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the marrow, thicken the sauce with the 2 egg yolks, and pour it over the marrow.

  2. Serve hot.

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. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  2. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  5. Flour + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Vegetable marrow
Forms the edible shell that holds the filling and softens during stewing.
Minced chicken, veal, or cold mutton
Supplies the savory meat filling that flavors the marrow.
Flour
Binds the minced meat so the filling holds together while cooking.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce into a smooth, rich coating for the marrow.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce with egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently, but if the sauce gets too hot it can curdle and turn grainy. Add them off the heat or over very low heat and stir constantly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, flour, pepper, egg, sauce):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, flour, pepper, egg, sauce. 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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