Name: Dinner
Ingredients: 6 oz. cooked meat; ½ lb. potatoes; 1 pint porter (for men above 16 years of age)

Why it works: Meat and potato work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 786 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Dinner

Ingredients

6 oz. cooked meat
½ lb. potatoes
1 pint porter (for men above 16 years of age)

Directions

Serve 6 oz. of cooked meat.
Boil or roast ½ lb. of potatoes until tender.
Serve 1 pint of porter for men above 16 years of age.

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.

Meat + potatotop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together786 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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes: Provide starchy bulk that becomes soft and tender when boiled or roasted.
Porter: Adds a malty, slightly bitter flavour as the accompanying drink.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.