Name: To Serve with Tomato Sauce
Ingredients: 1 pint minced tomatoes; 1 small onion, minced; ½ cup butter; Chili peppers to taste; Coarse sea salt to taste; Fish of your choice; Parsley for garnish; Sliced lemon for garnish

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 14,037 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Serve with Tomato Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

In a pan, combine minced tomatoes, minced onion, butter, and chili peppers.
Heat the mixture thoroughly but do not boil unless using fresh tomatoes.
Place the cooked fish on a platter.
Pour the sauce over the fish.
Garnish with parsley and sliced lemon.
Serve very hot.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together27,047 recipes

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

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together17,923 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned 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

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, butter, pepper, fish, parsley, lemon):

Capsicumbetter flavor fit
Carrotbetter flavor fit
Potatobetter flavor fit
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, butter, pepper, fish, parsley, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).