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Beef — Continued

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Beef — Continued

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, combine the shallot, orange rind, nutmeg, salt, and cayenne pepper. Simmer for 4-5 minutes.

  2. Add the brown sauce and bring to a boil.

  3. Mix the beef with the sauce, add lemon juice, and boil again.

  4. Place the mixture in the center of a dish, sprinkle with bread crumbs, and arrange the fried bread around it.

  5. Top each piece of fried bread with a poached egg and garnish with scallops of tongue.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, nutmeg, pepper, sauce, lemon, bread, butter):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, nutmeg, pepper, sauce, lemon, bread, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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