Name: Vegetable Marrows, Boiled
Ingredients: 1 large marrow; water for boiling; butter for serving; salt; pepper; grated nutmeg; pounded sugar; ½ pint veal stock; juice of ½ lemon

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Vegetable Marrows, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Peel the marrow and remove the seeds.
Cut the marrow into six or eight pieces.
Boil the pieces in water until tender, about 10-20 minutes.
Carefully lift the pieces out with a slotted spoon.
Place the pieces on toast.
Pour melted butter or white sauce over the marrows and serve.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,318 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together13,015 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together24,377 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,227 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, sugar, veal, lemon):

Parsleyfits better
Sagefits about as well
Marjoramfits about as well
Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sugar, veal, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.