Name: Menu for a Dinner for From 6 to 9 Persons
Ingredients: 1 large piece of beef; 2 partridges; 1 chicken; 1 whiting; spinach; white sauce; Madeira jelly; apricot pudding; semolina for soup

Why it works: Whiting and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 236 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Menu for a Dinner for From 6 to 9 Persons

serves 6 to 9

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare a semolina soup as a light starter.
Roast or braise the large piece of beef until tender.
Cook the partridges and chicken, then serve them hashed.
Fry or roast the whiting and serve it as a light dish.
Prepare spinach with white sauce as a side dish.
Make Madeira jelly for dessert.
Finish the meal with apricot pudding.

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.

Whiting + saucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together236 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Beef + chickentop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,148 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Spinach + semolinatop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together19 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Chicken + spinachtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,146 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Beef + spinachtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together490 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, chicken, whiting, spinach, sauce, semolina):

Lemonfits better
Avocadofits better
Limefits better
Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, chicken, whiting, spinach, sauce, semolina. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.