Name: Elena Toast
Ingredients: round pieces of toast; mustard butter; finely-chopped tongue; chopped white chicken meat; chopped truffle; chopped parsley

Why it works: Mustard and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,588 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Elena Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare round pieces of toast.
Spread mustard butter on the toast.
Border the edges with a line of finely-chopped tongue.
Garnish the middle of each toast with chopped white chicken meat.
In the center, drop a pinch of chopped truffle and parsley.

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.

Mustard + parsleytop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,588 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Butter + truffletop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,209 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Chicken + meattop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,449 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Mustard + chickentop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,192 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).
Meat + truffletop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together527 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

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mustard, butter, chicken, meat, truffle):

Capersfits better
Thymefits better
Garlicfits better
Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mustard, butter, chicken, meat, truffle. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.