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Dinner for 8 Persons. June.

A dinner menu for eight people featuring fish, eels, ox-piths, chickens, mutton, lamb cutlets, rabbits, quails, fritters, French beans, peach jelly, crayfish, and Queen's cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 20 ingredients
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Why it works: Lamb and rabbit share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 51 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Dinner for 8 Persons. June.

serves 8

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish and main dishes

  1. Prepare the fish and eels.

  2. Cook the eels with piquante sauce.

  3. Fry the ox-piths in batter.

  4. Serve with tomato sauce.

  5. Cook the chickens with herbs.

  6. Boil the neck of mutton until tender.

  7. Breadcrumb the lamb cutlets and fry them.

  8. Sauté the young rabbits with green peas.

  9. Make an Italian salad as a side dish.

  10. Prepare the quails.

  11. Serve them.

Fry, cook and serve the remaining dishes

  1. Fry the fritters and serve them hot.

  2. Cook the French beans with cream.

  3. Make peach jelly and serve it chilled.

  4. Prepare crayfish and serve them with sauce.

  5. Bake Queen's cakes and serve them for dessert.

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. Lamb + rabbittop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Chicken + lambtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Mutton + lambtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together598 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Tomato + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,031 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + peastop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,058 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Firm, rich flesh that holds its shape when cooked with a sharp sauce.
Batter
Forms a crisp coating that seals in moisture while the ox-piths fry.
Lamb cutlets
Breadcrumb coating crisps on the outside while the meat stays juicy inside.
Young rabbits
Tender meat that browns quickly in the pan and absorbs the flavour of the sauce.
Peach jelly
Gelatin sets the fruit juice into a firm, wobbly dessert once chilled.
Queen's cakes
Butter and eggs give a light, tender crumb when baked.

The step that matters

Boil the neck of mutton until tender. Mutton needs long, gentle simmering so collagen in the connective tissue breaks down into gelatin. Stopping early leaves the meat tough and chewy, while boiling hard can toughen the muscle fibres and make the meat dry.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, sauce, tomato, chicken, mutton, lamb, rabbit):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Peasthe original
  3. Peanutfits about as well
  4. Chickpeafits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, sauce, tomato, chicken, mutton, lamb, rabbit. 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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