Name: Pullet, with Truffles
Ingredients: 2 to 4 pounds truffles; 3 beets; 1 pound lard, chopped fine; sweet herbs, to taste; coarse sea salt, to taste; pepper, to taste; lemon juice, to taste; 3 to 4 fowls' livers

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 ↓

Pullet, with Truffles

Ingredients

Directions

Wash and rub the truffles in several waters.
Peel and finely chop the less beautiful beet.
In a stewpan, combine the chopped beet, whole beets with skins, lard, sweet herbs, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.
Cook over gentle heat for 1 hour, then remove and let cool.
Mash the fowls' livers with some chopped truffles in a mortar.
Mix the liver mixture with the cooled ingredients.
Stuff the pullet with the mixture and sew it up.
Let the pullet sit for a few days to absorb the truffle flavor.
Roast the pullet wrapped in buttered paper.

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).
Truffle + livertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together395 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).
Pepper + livertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,375 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Truffle + peppertop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,106 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Truffle + lemontop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together860 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).