Name: Sausage
Ingredients: 1 cup water; butter for basting; flour for dredging; 1 pint water for gravy; a pinch of cloves; a pinch of nutmeg; a pinch of cayenne; a few blades of mace; 2 tablespoons currant jelly (optional)

Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sausage

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Place the sausage in a roasting pan with 1 cup of water.
Baste the sausage every 15 to 20 minutes with butter and water.
Twenty minutes before serving, remove the paste and paper, dredge with flour, and baste with butter until light brown.
Pour in 1 pint of water to make a thick gravy, adding cloves, nutmeg, cayenne, and mace.
Strain the gravy before serving and add currant jelly if desired.
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.

Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,686 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,557 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,400 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,623 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, clove, nutmeg, mace):

Raisinfits better
Figfits better
Lemonfits better
Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, clove, nutmeg, mace. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.