Name: Stewed Chicken and Dumplings
Ingredients: 1 chicken, cut into pieces; 3 pints water; 3 slices carrot; 3 slices turnip; 1 large onion; 3 tablespoons flour; Salt, to taste; Pepper, to taste; Butter, to taste

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Chicken and Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Wash the chicken and place it in a deep stew pan with 3 pints of water. Bring to a boil.
In another saucepan, cook the carrot, turnip, and onion slowly for 30 minutes.
Strain the vegetables and add them to the stew pan with the chicken. Dip some of the cooking water into the vegetable mixture.
Mash the vegetables with the back of a spoon and rub them through the strainer into the stew.
Skim 2 tablespoons of chicken fat and add it to the pan used for the vegetables. Heat until boiling.
Stir in 3 tablespoons of flour and simmer the stew until the chicken is tender, about 2 hours.
Season with salt, pepper, and butter to taste.
Ten minutes before serving, add dumplings and cook 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.

Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,555 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together21,601 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,874 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, carrot, turnip, flour, pepper, butter):

Leekfits better
Parsnipfits better
Okrafits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, carrot, turnip, flour, pepper, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.