Name: Meat Curry
Ingredients: ½ lb cold meat scraps, minced; ½ lb cold vegetables (potatoes, carrots, peas, turnips), well mashed; 1 sour apple, chopped small

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Meat Curry

Ingredients

½ lb cold meat scraps, minced
½ lb cold vegetables (potatoes, carrots, peas, turnips), well mashed
1 sour apple, chopped small

Directions

Mix the minced meat and mashed vegetables together.
Prepare the curry as instructed in Lesson V.

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.

Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,107 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Carrot + peastop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,994 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Potato + turniptop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together562 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,350 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, potato, carrot, peas, turnip):

Limefits better
Pumpkinfits better
Lemonfits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, potato, carrot, peas, turnip. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.