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Dinner. — Sunday.

A simple Sunday dinner of cooked meat, potatoes, bread, beer, and pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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. — Sunday.

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook the meat with the bone until tender.

  2. Boil or bake the potatoes until soft.

  3. Slice the bread.

  4. Serve the cooked meat, potatoes, and bread with beer.

  5. Prepare the pudding according to package instructions.

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.

  1. Meat + potatotop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together786 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Potato + beertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Bread + beertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together146 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

  5. Potato + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together434 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked meat with bone
Provides the main protein and savory flavor of the meal.
Potatoes
Starch that softens with heat, giving a soft, filling texture.
Bread
Adds a starchy base that balances the richer main dish.
Beer
Adds a malty, slightly bitter flavor to the meal.

The step that matters

Cook the potatoes until fully soft. Starch in potatoes only becomes tender when heated long enough to gelatinize. Undercooked potatoes stay firm, chalky, and unpleasant to eat.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, bread, beer):

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, bread, beer. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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