Name: Stewed Rump of Beef with Onions
Ingredients: ¼ pound butter; 6 ounces flour; 2 quarts beef stock; 4 carrots; 4 turnips; 40 button onions; powdered sugar; a bunch of parsley

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Stewed Rump of Beef with Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.
Add the flour and stir until it turns a little brown.
Remove from heat and let it cool.
Stir in the beef stock and bring to a boil.
Add the chopped carrots, turnips, and peeled onions.
Simmer until the vegetables are tender, skimming as needed.
Add a little powdered sugar and parsley.
If the sauce is too thick, add more stock.
Serve the beef on a dish with the sauce around it.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,842 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together21,601 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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 (butter, flour, beef, carrot, turnip, sugar, parsley):

Parsnipfits better
Leekfits better
Shallotfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, beef, carrot, turnip, sugar, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.