Name: Chicken Puddings a LA Richelieu
Ingredients: white onions, diced; butter; farce (made from veal, fowl, rabbits, whitings, or carp); boiling water; coarse sea salt; yolks of eggs, beaten

Why it works: Onion and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,912 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Chicken Puddings a LA Richelieu

Ingredients

Directions

Sweat the diced white onions in butter until well done, then drain them to remove excess butter.
Mix the farce with the onions using a wooden spoon to keep it intact, then let it cool completely.
Shape the cooled farce into pudding shapes that fit the dish.
Butter a large stew-pan and place the puddings inside.
Pour boiling water with a little salt into the stew-pan and let the puddings boil gently until they swell.
Drain the puddings and let them cool.
Once cool, mold them into equal sizes and dip them in the beaten egg yolks.

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.

Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together42,912 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Onion + vealtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6,841 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Butter + vealtop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,381 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Veal + eggtop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6,845 recipes

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