Name: Celery Sauce for Boiled Fowls
Ingredients: Celery stalks; Weak gravy or water; Powdered mace; Pepper; Coarse sea salt; Juice of 1 lemon; Butter; Flour

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 ↓

Celery Sauce for Boiled Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Wash the celery stalks and cut them into thin slices about 2 inches long.
Stew the celery in a little weak gravy or water until tender.
Season with powdered mace, pepper, and coarse sea salt.
Add the juice of 1 lemon.
Thicken the sauce with a small piece of butter kneaded in flour.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,467 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Celery + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,905 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

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, pepper, lemon, butter, flour):

Parsleyfits better
Tarragonfits better
Thymefits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, pepper, lemon, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.