Name: Lean Meat Cakes
Ingredients: well-grown beef (center of the round); butter; pepper; coarse sea salt; Worcestershire sauce (optional); mustard (optional); horseradish (optional); lemon juice (optional); dry celery (optional)

Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lean Meat Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Remove all fat, fascia, connective tissue, and bone from the beef.
Shred the meat on a board using a blunt knife.
Scrape the pulp together with a spoon, discarding tough parts.
Mold the scraped pulp into cakes about ½ to 1 inch thick.
Broil the cakes slowly over a clear fire free from smoke.
Serve on a hot plate with a little butter and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Add Worcestershire sauce, mustard, horseradish, lemon juice, or dry celery for flavoring if desired.

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.

Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,832 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,169 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,467 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).