Name: Meat Sauce
Ingredients: 6 dozen large cucumbers, peeled and sliced; 1 peck onions, peeled and sliced; fire roasted peppers, seeded and chopped; 1 pound mustard seed; 1 ounce celery seed; 1 pound brown sugar; a little horseradish, cut in small bits; 1 gallon vinegar; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Meat Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the vegetables overnight and drain them in the morning.
Mix the brown sugar with ½ box of dry mustard and a little vinegar until smooth.
Boil the remaining vinegar; when hot, add the other ingredients.
Let it scald well and seal.

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.

Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,832 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,169 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Cucumber + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together640 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,281 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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 (cucumber, pepper, mustard, celery, sugar, horseradish, vinegar):

Lettucefits better
Radishfits better
Beetrootfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, pepper, mustard, celery, sugar, horseradish, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.