Name: Force-meat Chartreuses
Ingredients: thickly-garnished ragout a la Toulouse (cold); force-meat; button mushrooms; black truffles; fat bacon; Toulouse ragout

Why it works: Mushroom and truffle are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,900 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Force-meat Chartreuses

Ingredients

Directions

Smooth the cavity with a spoon dipped in hot water and fill it within an inch of the surface with the cold ragout.
Cover the top with force-meat, leaving the paper on, and keep it in a cool place until two hours before dinner.
Steam the chartreuse in a deep saucepan with enough boiling water to reach halfway up the mold.
Cover the saucepan with a lid and keep it over a slow fire with live embers of charcoal on top.
Once done, carefully turn it out onto a dish.
Garnish the top with button mushrooms around the edge and place a star made of eight small fillets of fowl in the center, decorated with black truffles.
Garnish the base with thin Toulouse ragout and glaze the sides lightly before serving.

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.

Mushroom + truffletop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,900 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Meat + truffletop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together527 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Meat + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,423 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).