Name: Stuffed Bell Peppers
Ingredients: 6 bell peppers; 2 cups cooked rice; 2 tablespoons butter; 2 small slices of bacon (or butter); 3 tomatoes (or 3 canned tomatoes); salt to taste; red pepper to taste

Why it works: Rice and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Stuffed Bell Peppers

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Wash the bell peppers, cut off the stem, and remove the seeds.

Make the filling

Fry finely chopped onion and green peppers slowly with bacon or butter until the onion is tender.
Add the tomatoes and cook for 5 minutes.
Stir in the cooked rice.
Season with salt and red pepper.
Cook for another 5 minutes.

Stuff and bake

Stuff the peppers with the rice mixture.
Place the stuffed peppers in a baking dish.
Top each pepper with a small lump of butter.
Bake until the peppers are tender.
Serve 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Rice + tomatotop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,923 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Pepper + ricetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,379 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,645 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bell peppers: Hold the filling and soften into tender shells during baking.
Cooked rice: Bulks up the filling and absorbs the juices from the tomatoes and peppers.
Tomatoes: Add moisture and acidity that flavour the rice filling.
Butter: Adds richness and fat, helping flavour and browning on top.
Bacon: Adds smoky, savoury fat when frying the onion and green peppers.