Name: Noodle Soup
Ingredients: 1 quart all-purpose flour; 4 large eggs; a pinch of salt

Why it works: Flour and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Noodle Soup

Ingredients

1 quart all-purpose flour
4 large eggs
a pinch of salt

Directions

Make the dough

In a bowl, combine flour, eggs, and salt to form a stiff dough.
Roll out the dough very thin and let it rest for 1 hour.

Cut and dry the noodles

Roll the dough tightly and cut it into very thin strips.
Allow the noodles to dry.

Cook and serve

Drop the noodles into chicken or beef broth and boil for 20 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.

Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together106,462 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour: Forms the main structure of the dough once combined with liquid from the eggs.
Eggs: Bind the dough and add richness and firmness to the noodles.