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

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 of a mold with a spoon dipped in hot water.
Fill it with ragout a la Toulouse, leaving an inch from the top.
Cover with force-meat, keeping the paper on, and refrigerate until two hours before serving.
Steam the chartreuse in a deep pan with boiling water halfway up the mold.
Cover the pan with a lid and live embers of charcoal.
Once done, carefully turn it out onto a dish.
Garnish the top with button mushrooms and a star made of small fillets of fowl 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).