Name: Venison Fry
Ingredients: Venison (liver, heart, skirts, melt, etc.); Pepper; Coarse sea salt; Flour; Hot fat for frying; Fried parsley (for garnish); Highly-seasoned brown gravy (for serving); Red currant jelly (optional)

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Venison Fry

Ingredients

Directions

Clean the venison and cut it into neat slices about ½ inch thick.
Season the slices with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Dredge flour over the slices.
Fry in hot fat until they are browned and cooked through.
Drain the slices and arrange them on a hot dish.
Place fried parsley in the center.
Serve highly-seasoned brown gravy in a tureen.
Optionally, serve red currant jelly as an accompaniment.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + red curranttop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together267 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).
Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together16,675 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Parsley + red curranttop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together96 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Liver + parsleytop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,095 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Swap the red currant

The recipe marks red currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, liver, pepper, flour, parsley):

Lemonfits better
Limefits better
Red currantthe original
Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, liver, pepper, flour, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.