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To Dress Cardoons, or Chardons

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

To Dress Cardoons, or Chardons

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Scrape the cardoons like asparagus and tie them in bundles.

  2. Boil the cardoons in salted water until tender.

  3. In a pan, melt butter and add flour to create a roux.

  4. Fry the boiled cardoons in the butter until brown.

  5. Serve with a rich brown sauce or melted butter.

  6. Alternatively, parboil, dry, dip in batter, and fry until crisp.

  7. For a stew, add cayenne, lemon juice, and salt to the gravy, thicken with butter and flour, and top with sliced marrow.

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. Cardoon + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together33 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cardoon + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cardoon + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together31 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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