Name: Mushroom Baskets
Ingredients: puff paste; uncooked rice or flour; fresh or canned mushrooms; small piece of onion; juice and pulp of 1 large tomato; 1 tablespoon butter; 1 tablespoon thick white sauce; lemon juice; parsley for garnish

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Mushroom Baskets

Ingredients

Directions

Make puff paste and roll it out very thin.
Line small, suitably shaped moulds with the paste.
Fill the center with uncooked rice or flour to keep the shape while baking.
Cut strips of paste, twist them, and bend them for handles.
Bake until pale brown.
Once baked, empty out the rice and remove from the moulds.
Chop mushrooms and onion, then squeeze in the juice and pulp of the tomato.
In a saucepan, combine the mushroom mixture with butter and thick white sauce.
Stir until the mixture is thick enough to eat with a fork.
Squeeze a few drops of lemon on top, attach the handles, garnish with parsley, and serve.

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.

Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Rice + tomatotop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,065 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Mushroom + tomatotop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,719 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,633 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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 (rice, mushroom, onion, tomato, butter, sauce, parsley):

Avocadofits better
Coconutfits about as well
Limefits about as well
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, mushroom, onion, tomato, butter, sauce, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.