Name: Hotch Potch
Ingredients: lamb chops; cabbage; lettuce; turnips; onions; green peas; potatoes; pepper; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Lettuce and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 526 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Hotch Potch

Ingredients

Directions

Fry the lamb chops until half cooked.
Chop the cabbage, lettuce, turnips, and onions.
Boil the chopped vegetables with pepper and coarse sea salt.
One hour before dinner, add the lamb chops and green peas to the boiling vegetables.
Boil the potatoes separately.

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.

Lettuce + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together526 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together897 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).
Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together622 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, cabbage, lettuce, turnip, onion, potato, pepper):

Beansfits better
Lentilsfits better
Chickpeafits better
Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, cabbage, lettuce, turnip, onion, potato, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.