Name: Hominy and Bacon
Ingredients: 3 cups cold boiled hominy; ½ pound thinly sliced bacon; 1 teaspoon salt; 1 teaspoon pepper; sprigs of parsley

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Hominy and Bacon

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

In a hot pan, fry the bacon until browned, turning often.
Remove the bacon and keep it warm on a hot platter.
Add the cold boiled hominy to the pan and heat through.
Serve the hominy topped with the bacon and garnish with parsley.

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.

Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Hominy: Forms the bulk of the dish; heating it through makes it warm and tender to eat.
Bacon: Browns in the hot pan, adding savory flavor and rendered fat to the dish.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.