Name: Lamb Chops, Sauce Fineste
Ingredients: ½ tablespoon butter; a few grains mustard; a few grains cayenne pepper; ¼ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce; a few drops lemon juice; 2 tablespoons stewed and strained tomatoes; 1 cup cooked spinach; salt; pepper

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lamb Chops, Sauce Fineste

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the butter in a pan until browned.
Add mustard, cayenne, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, and strained tomatoes to the pan.
Chop the cooked spinach and season with salt and pepper.
Press the spinach through a puree strainer and reheat in butter.
Arrange the spinach on a serving dish and garnish with strips of hard-boiled egg white and yolk forced through a strainer.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together503 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Lemon + spinachtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,109 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Pepper + spinachtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,400 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Tomato + spinachtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,350 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, mustard, pepper, sauce, lemon, spinach):

Shallotfits better
Horseradishfits better
Lettucefits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mustard, pepper, sauce, lemon, spinach. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.