Name: Roiled Vegetable Marrow
Ingredients: 1 large vegetable marrow; ½ cup coarse sea salt; melted butter or salt butter; toasted bread (for garnish); salt (to taste); pepper (to taste); butter (for mashing)

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Roiled Vegetable Marrow

Ingredients

Directions

Boil a saucepan of salted water.
Peel the marrow and add it to the boiling water.
Cook until tender, then remove and halve or quarter if large.
Serve on toast with melted butter or a pat of salt butter.
For mashed marrow, boil, drain, and mash with a wooden spoon.
Heat the mashed marrow in a saucepan, adding salt, pepper, and a small piece of butter.
Garnish with snippets of toasted bread.
For fried marrow, slice, dip in a batter of flour and water, and fry in butter for 10 minutes.

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.

Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).