Name: Chartreuse of Vegetables
Ingredients: bacon; carrots; turnips; French beans; mashed potatoes; cauliflower; spinach; veal (optional); asparagus or mushroom sauce

Why it works: Turnip and cauliflower match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 286 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chartreuse of Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Line a plain mold with bacon.
Prepare half-cooked carrots, turnips, and French beans, cutting them to the same length.
Arrange the vegetables prettily around the mold until full.
Fill the center with mashed potatoes, cauliflower, spinach, or veal.
Steam the mold until cooked through.
Turn it out onto a plate and serve with asparagus or mushroom sauce.

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.

Turnip + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together286 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Cauliflower + asparagustop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together163 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Beans + asparagustop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together292 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Spinach + asparagustop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together274 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, beans, cauliflower, spinach, veal, asparagus):

Leekfits better
Beetrootfits better
Lettucefits better
Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, beans, cauliflower, spinach, veal, asparagus. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.