Name: Ray, with Caper Sauce
Ingredients: 4 pounds ray-fish; 1 onion, sliced; 3 parsley roots; 4 cloves; 6 peppercorns; ½ ounce coarse sea salt; 4 tablespoons vinegar; white sauce; capers

Why it works: Parsley and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ray, with Caper Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA gentle oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cut the ray-fish into moderate-sized pieces.
In a saucepan, combine the fish, onion, parsley roots, cloves, peppercorns, salt, and vinegar.
Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes without boiling.
Remove the skin from both sides of the fish and return it to the saucepan to keep warm.
In a frying pan, melt 4 ounces of butter until it turns black.
Fry a dozen sprigs of parsley in the butter for a moment, then remove them.
Serve the fish with the white sauce and add capers on top.

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,550 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,768 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Onion + caperstop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,381 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Clove + caperstop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together412 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, onion, parsley, vinegar, sauce, capers):

Tarragonfits better
Garlicfits better
Dillfits better
Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, onion, parsley, vinegar, sauce, capers. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.