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Stuffed Vegetable Marrow

A vegetable marrow half filled with a veal, ham, or chicken mixture, seasoned, tied, and cooked in stock or milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Stuffed Vegetable Marrow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the marrow

  1. Cut the vegetable marrow in half lengthwise and blanch in boiling water for 5 minutes.

  2. Remove all the seeds from the marrow.

Fill and tie

  1. Fill the cavity with a mixture of veal and ham, or chicken and ham.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and add the beaten egg.

  3. Tie the vegetable marrow tightly together.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook gently in stock or milk, pouring some over the marrow when 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.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Veal + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,580 recipes

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

  4. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Vegetable marrow
Serves as the edible shell that holds the filling while it cooks.
Minced veal and ham
Provides the savoury, meaty filling that gives the dish its main body.
Egg
Binds the minced filling so it holds together when cut and served.
Stock or milk
Gently simmers the marrow, keeping it moist as it cooks.

The step that matters

Tie the marrow tightly. If the halves are not held firmly together, the filling can escape and spill into the cooking liquid while the marrow softens and cooks.

“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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