Name: How to Prepare Decorated Quenelles
Ingredients: force-meat of poultry, game, or fish; butter; truffles or pickled tongue; albumen; salt

Why it works: Butter and truffle are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,209 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

How to Prepare Decorated Quenelles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare large quenelles using force-meat and shape them on buttered white paper.
Smooth the surface with a small knife.
Decorate with truffles or pickled tongue before or after poaching.
If decorating before poaching, moisten with albumen and encrust the details in the force-meat.
Poach the quenelles in salted water without boiling, keeping them on the paper.
If decorating after poaching, apply the decoration on one side with soft force-meat to help it stick.

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.

Butter + truffletop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,209 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Meat + truffletop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together527 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,594 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).