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Liver, Brains, or Fish Timbals

A fish timbal made with fish, brains, mushrooms, butter, eggs, and cream, boiled in timbal forms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Liver, Brains, or Fish Timbals

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Skin the brains and wash them through a colander.

  2. Add chopped mushrooms and season with salt, pepper, and cayenne.

  3. Cream the butter, then mix in the egg yolks and cream.

  4. Combine this mixture with the brains and mushrooms.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg white.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil in well-buttered timbal forms for one hour in a covered pan of water.

  2. Serve with poulette sauce and chopped mushrooms.

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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

  4. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Fish + mushroomtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together444 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Enriches the mixture and helps bind it as it cooks.
Egg white
Beaten and folded in to lighten the mixture and help it set with airy structure.
Butter
Creamed to add richness and moisture to the mixture.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the filling soft.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg white. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the egg white, which gives the timbal a light texture. Overmixing deflates the foam and leaves the result dense.

“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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