Name: Menus for Moderate-priced Dinners
Ingredients: Flank steak; Onions; Turnips; Butter; Rice; Cabbage; Celery; Corn-starch; Sweet potatoes

Why it works: Turnip and cabbage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 897 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Menus for Moderate-priced Dinners

Ingredients

Directions

Cook flank steak with sliced onions until browned.
Slice turnips and sauté in butter until tender.
Prepare rice according to package instructions.
Chop cabbage and celery for salad.
Make corn-starch pudding according to package instructions.
Boil sweet potatoes until soft, then sprinkle with salt.

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.

Turnip + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together897 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,418 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + sweet potatotop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together71 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Rice + corntop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together933 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, turnip, butter, rice, celery, corn, sweet potato):

Okrafits better
Carrotfits better
Parsnipfits better
Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, turnip, butter, rice, celery, corn, sweet potato. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.