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Elegant Force Meat for Stewed Fish

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Elegant Force Meat for Stewed Fish

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Take lean veal, ham, parsley, thyme, shallots, allspice, and pepper.

  2. Add mushrooms or mushroom powder, salt, and lemon juice.

  3. Cook over low heat, shaking the saucepan frequently, until about two-thirds done.

  4. Pound the mixture very fine in a marble mortar.

  5. Add bread crumbs and raw yolk of egg to form into balls or for stuffing.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,077 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Thyme + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, parsley, thyme, shallot, pepper, mushroom):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, parsley, thyme, shallot, pepper, mushroom. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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