Name: Celery Sauce for Turkey
Ingredients: 1 head of celery; 1 egg yolk; Juice of 1 lemon; Liquor from boiled turkey; Salt to taste; Pepper to taste

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 ↓

Celery Sauce for Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

Boil the head of celery until tender.
Pass the cooked celery through a sieve.

Make the sauce

In a bowl, beat the egg yolk with the strained lemon juice.
Add the sieved celery and a couple of spoonfuls of the turkey liquor.
Season with salt and pepper to taste.

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).
Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,467 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Celery + turkeytop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together431 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Turkey + peppertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,636 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery: Forms the body and flavor of the sauce when boiled and sieved into a purée.
Egg yolk: Emulsifies and thickens the sauce, giving it a smooth, rich texture.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the richness of the yolk.
Turkey liquor: Adds savory depth and moisture, thinning the purée into a pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Beat the egg yolk with the lemon juice before adding the celery. Beating the yolk with acid first helps it blend smoothly into the mixture. Adding the purée too quickly, or to unbeaten yolk, can leave the sauce lumpy or thin, so the yolk should be fully combined before the celery goes in.