Name: Pot Roast
Ingredients: 2 pounds beef; 3 tablespoons flour; 1 turnip, diced; 1 carrot, diced; 2 onions, chopped; 4 potatoes, diced; Salt to taste; Pepper to taste

Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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 ↓

Pot Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Wipe the meat and make 4 gashes in it.
Cut the suet into 6 thin strips and insert 4 strips into the gashes.
Tie the meat securely with string.
Dredge the meat with flour, salt, and pepper.
Brown the meat on all sides in a frying pan with the remaining suet.
Transfer the browned meat to a saucepan.
Pour ½ cup of boiling water into the frying pan and add it to the saucepan.
Cover the saucepan and cook slowly.

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.

Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,023 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,107 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,555 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 (beef, flour, turnip, carrot, potato, pepper):

Parsnipfits better
Leekfits better
Okrafits better
Onionthe original

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