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Dinner for 8 Persons. February.

A menu for eight people featuring hare soup, lobster sauce, capon with rice, braised mutton, veal patties, potato chips, and ptarmigan with apple pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 27 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Dinner for 8 Persons. February.

8 persons

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Prepare hare soup by boiling hare with water, onions, carrots, celery, bay leaves, peppercorns, and coarse sea salt until tender.

  2. Strain the soup and thicken with a roux made from butter and flour, then add cream.

Prepare the main dishes

  1. Serve with lobster sauce and broiled whitings garnished with capers.

  2. Cook capon and serve with rice.

  3. Braise leg of mutton with seasoning and serve.

  4. Make patties filled with veal and garnished with pheasants.

  5. Prepare potato chips as a side dish.

  6. Roast ptarmigans and serve with apple pudding.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Lobster + whitingtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together73 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Cream + lobstertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Hare
Provides the meat and the rich, savoury flavour of the soup.
Butter
Forms the fat base of the roux and adds rich flavour.
Flour
Its starch swells when heated with butter, thickening the soup.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Thickening the soup with the roux. Flour must be cooked in the butter and whisked into the hot soup to avoid lumps. Cooking it long enough also removes the raw floury taste and lets the starch thicken the liquid evenly.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, celery, butter, flour, cream, lobster, whiting):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, celery, butter, flour, cream, lobster, whiting. 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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