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Dinner for 12 Persons. July.

A multi-course dinner featuring green pea soup, mutton cutlets, chicken vol-au-vent, and a currant-raspberry dessert.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Peas and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 173 recipes. Both carry 2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Dinner for 12 Persons. July.

serves 12

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Cook peas with salt and butter until tender.

  2. Blend the soup until smooth.

  3. Strain the blended soup.

  4. Cook veal tendons with vegetables and peas until tender.

Prepare the cutlets

  1. Sauté shallots in butter.

  2. Add mutton cutlets to the shallots.

  3. Coat the cutlets with bread crumbs.

  4. Broil the cutlets until golden brown.

Make and bake the vol-au-vent

  1. Prepare vol-au-vent pastry.

  2. Fill the pastry with a mixture of chicken and cream.

  3. Bake the filled pastry until golden.

Prepare the dessert filling

  1. Mix currants and raspberries with sugar and flour.

Serve

  1. Serve the soup, mutton cutlets, and vol-au-vent as the main courses.

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. Peas + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together173 recipes

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Peas + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together804 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexyl acetate (fruity, apple).

  5. Mutton + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Peas
Cooked until tender, then blended, they form the body and colour of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour when cooking the peas and softening the shallots.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating on the cutlets when broiled.
Eggs
Listed in the record but no step uses them; left out of the role list.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness to the chicken filling inside the pastry.
Flour
Thickens the mixture of currants, raspberries and sugar.

The step that matters

Blending and straining the soup. Blending until smooth and then straining removes fibres and skins, so the soup has a silky texture rather than a grainy one.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, butter, mutton, bread, veal, chicken, cream):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, butter, mutton, bread, veal, chicken, cream. 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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