Name: A Week's Dinners for the Working-man's Home
Ingredients: 2 pounds of meat; ½ pound of suet or 2 tablespoons of dripping; ½ pound of flour; coarse sea salt to taste; pepper to taste; 2 pounds of potatoes; mixed carrots, onions, and turnips

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Week's Dinners for the Working-man's Home

Ingredients

Directions

Peel and slice the potatoes very thinly, then soak them in water until needed.
Peel and slice the onion and turnips, and scrape the carrot. Cut all into small squares and wash well.
Rub the suet or dripping into the flour, then add salt and pepper to taste.
Mix with cold water to form a dumpling consistency and shape into dumplings.

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.

Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,023 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,107 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,555 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 onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, flour, pepper, potato, carrot, turnip):

Parsnipfits better
Leekfits better
Spinachfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, flour, pepper, potato, carrot, turnip. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.