Name: Ordinary Diet
Ingredients: 1 lb bread; ½ lb cooked meat (roast mutton or boiled mutton or boiled beef); ½ lb potatoes; 1 pint soup (on boiled meat days)

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 ↓

Ordinary Diet

Ingredients

1 lb bread
½ lb cooked meat (roast mutton or boiled mutton or boiled beef)
½ lb potatoes
1 pint soup (on boiled meat days)

Directions

Serve 1 lb of bread as a side.
Use ½ lb of cooked meat, alternating between roast mutton, boiled mutton, or boiled beef.
Prepare ½ lb of potatoes as desired.
On days with boiled meat, serve 1 pint of soup.

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).
Bread + meattop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,924 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Bread + potatotop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together434 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).