Name: Beef and Celery Bouillon
Ingredients: 3 onions; 1 carrot; 1 small turnip; 1 large head of celery; 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce; salt; pepper

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Beef and Celery Bouillon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare a good brown clear stock.
Slice the onions, carrot, and turnip, and boil them together in the stock.
Cut the celery into small dice and stew until tender.
Strain the stock and add the celery along with its juice.
Thicken the mixture slightly, then add Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper.
Serve hot.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,173 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,418 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 (carrot, turnip, celery, sauce, pepper):

Parsnipfits better
Leekfits better
Lettucefits better
Onionthe original

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