Name: Force-meat Chartkeuses
Ingredients: thickly-garnished ragout à la Toulouse; force-meat; button mushrooms; black truffles; fat bacon

Why it works: Mushroom and truffle are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,900 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Force-meat Chartkeuses

Ingredients

Directions

Smooth the cavity of a mold with a spoon dipped in hot water.
Fill it with ragout to within an inch of the surface.
Cover with force-meat, leaving the paper on, and keep cool until two hours before dinner.
Steam in a deep saucepan with boiling water reaching halfway up the mold.
Cover the saucepan and keep the water boiling on a slow fire.
Once done, carefully turn out onto a dish.
Garnish with button mushrooms around the edge and a star of small fillets of fowl in the center.
Decorate with black truffles and glaze the sides lightly before 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.

Mushroom + truffletop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,900 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Meat + truffletop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together527 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Meat + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,423 recipes

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