Name: Gravies and Sauces
Ingredients: 195 mings of meat or poultry; broth or water; 1 carrot; 3 onions; parsley; thyme; 2 bay leaves; chopped mushrooms (optional); white roux or sweet thick cream

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Gravies and Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Moisten the meat with broth or water.
Add the carrot, onions, parsley, thyme, bay leaves, and mushrooms.
Heat the meat through without burning, pricking it to let the juices flow.
Once cooked, remove the meat and let the stew-pan sit by the fire for a few minutes.
Skim the fat off the sauce, strain, and boil until reduced to your desired quantity.
Thicken with white roux, boil again, and skim if necessary.
Stir continuously, lifting the sauce with a spoon to make it smooth.

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.

Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,057 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together4,563 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Thyme + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,557 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together21,601 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, carrot, parsley, thyme, mushroom, cream):

Shallotfits better
Parsnipfits better
Leekfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, carrot, parsley, thyme, mushroom, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.