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Pork À l'Italienne

Roasted pork served with a butter, shallot, flour, and garlic sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pork À l'Italienne

Ingredients

Directions

Roast the pork

  1. Roast the pork in the usual way.

Make the sauce

  1. Rub a small saucepan with garlic.

  2. Melt the butter in the saucepan.

  3. Add the minced shallots and cook until soft.

  4. Dredge the flour over the shallots and stir well.

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. Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Garlic + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Pork
Forms the main body of the dish and carries its savoury flavour.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, rounded flavour to the sauce.
Shallots
Soften as they cook, adding mild sweetness and aromatic depth.
Flour
Thickens the butter and shallot mixture so it becomes a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Garlic
Rubbed into the pan to lend a subtle aroma to the butter and shallots.

The step that matters

Dredging the flour into the shallots. Flour clumps if added in one spot or without stirring, leaving lumps. Stirring it through the fat coats each grain so it thickens evenly, and cooking it briefly removes its raw, floury taste.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, butter, shallot, flour, garlic):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, butter, shallot, flour, garlic. 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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