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An Emince of Fowl, Veal, and Sweetbread

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Sauce and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,147 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

An Emince of Fowl, Veal, and Sweetbread

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mince the white part of the cold fowl.

  2. Heat the béchamel sauce in a stewpan.

  3. Add the minced fowl to the hot sauce.

  4. Squeeze the lemon over the mixture and add the vinegar and sugar.

  5. Place the mixture on a dish and arrange the fillets on top.

  6. Garnish with sippets of bread.

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. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + breadtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + vinegartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, vinegar, sugar, bread):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, vinegar, sugar, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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