Name: Stuffing for Veal, Turkey or Duck
Ingredients: ¼ pound beef suet; ½ pound bread crumbs; 1 bunch parsley; ¼ bunch sweet marjoram or lemon thyme; grated lemon (to taste); onion (chopped finely, to taste); pepper (to taste); coarse sea salt (to taste); 2 eggs

Why it works: Parsley and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,979 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Stuffing for Veal, Turkey or Duck

Ingredients

Directions

In a bowl, combine beef suet, bread crumbs, parsley, marjoram or thyme, grated lemon, chopped onion, pepper, and salt.
Pound the mixture together with the yolk and white of the eggs.
Stuff the mixture into the veal, turkey, or duck.
Secure the opening with a skewer or sew it closed with a needle and thread.

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.

Parsley + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,979 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Marjoram + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together957 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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 (beef, bread, parsley, marjoram, lemon, pepper, egg):

Carrotfits better
Shallotfits better
Leekfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, bread, parsley, marjoram, lemon, pepper, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.