Name: Chicken Liver Paste
Ingredients: chicken livers; hot chicken fat; fresh or dried mushrooms; lemon juice; onion juice; coarse sea salt; black pepper; buttered toast or salted crackers

Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Chicken Liver Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Cook chicken livers slowly in hot chicken fat for a few minutes.
Drain and strain the livers through a sieve.
Sauté fresh or dried mushrooms and chop them very fine.
Mix the chopped mushrooms with the liver, then add lemon juice, onion juice, salt, and pepper to taste.
Spread the mixture on pieces of buttered toast or on salted crackers.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Chicken + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,172 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).
Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,814 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).
Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,626 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 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 lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, liver, mushroom, onion, pepper):

Limefits about as well
Lemonthe original
Avocadofits about as well
Grapefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, liver, mushroom, onion, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.