Name: Dinner
Ingredients: 6 oz. boiled mutton; 6 oz. roast mutton; 6 oz. roast beef; 1 pint broth

Why it works: Mutton and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,373 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Dinner

Ingredients

6 oz. boiled mutton
6 oz. roast mutton
6 oz. roast beef
1 pint broth

Directions

On Sunday and Thursday, serve 6 oz. of boiled mutton.
On Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, serve 6 oz. of roast mutton.
On Tuesday and Friday, serve 6 oz. of roast beef.
For supper, serve 1 pint of broth.

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.

Mutton + beeftop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,373 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

Boiled mutton: Provides the main protein for the Sunday and Thursday meals.
Roast mutton: Provides the main protein for the Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday meals.
Roast beef: Provides the main protein for the Tuesday and Friday meals.
Broth: Provides liquid and savory flavor for the supper course.

“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.