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Pate-chaud of Leverets, with Truffles, a LA Perigueux

A hot pâté made from leverets, truffles, and glaze, served with Poivrade sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and truffle are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,209 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Pate-chaud of Leverets, with Truffles, a LA Perigueux

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pâté

  1. Heat the clarified butter in a sauté pan over a brisk fire.

  2. Add the leveret joints and season them with salt and pepper.

  3. Fry the leveret joints until browned.

  4. Add the truffles and glaze.

  5. Cover the pan with a lid containing live embers.

  6. Reduce the heat to simmer for 20 minutes.

  7. Stir in the Poivrade sauce and let the mixture boil together for 3 minutes.

Serve

  1. Garnish the pâté-chaud.

  2. Serve.

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. Butter + truffletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Pepper + walnuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,039 recipes

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

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Truffle + walnuttop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Leverets
Provide the main meat, which browns in the butter and becomes tender as it simmers.
Clarified butter
Carries the heat for browning the meat and adds rich fat flavour.
Truffles
Add a strong, earthy aroma to the dish.
Glaze
Adds savoury depth and body to the sauce as it melts into the pan.
Poivrade sauce
Adds moisture and a seasoned sauce that is brought together with the meat.

The step that matters

Frying the leveret joints until browned. Browning the meat over a brisk fire builds flavour through the Maillard reaction. If the pan is crowded or too cool, the joints steam and go grey instead of browning.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, truffle, sauce):

  1. Beansfits about as well
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, truffle, 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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