Name: Artichoke Bottoms
Ingredients: little artichokes; acidulated water; oil; lemon juice; mayonnaise or other purée; parsley

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Artichoke Bottoms

Ingredients

Directions

Remove the leaves and hearts from the artichokes and trim the bases.
Plunge the trimmed artichokes into acidulated water to prevent browning.
Cook the artichokes as you would Jerusalem artichokes and let them cool in their cooking liquid.
Drain the artichokes well, dry them, and place them in a pan.
Marinate the artichokes in oil and lemon juice for twenty minutes.
Garnish with mayonnaise or another purée, and serve with a vegetable salad.
Arrange on a hors d'oeuvre dish and garnish with parsley.

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.

Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Artichoke + lemontop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together636 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Artichoke + parsleytop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together524 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).