Name: Game Soups
Ingredients: ½ cup chopped parsley; 2 or 3 lemons; a little cayenne pepper

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Game Soups

Ingredients

½ cup chopped parsley
2 or 3 lemons
a little cayenne pepper

Directions

Take half of the turtle and add chopped parsley.
Let it cool, then roll into balls the size of an egg or smaller.
Poach the balls in boiling salted water until very hard, then drain on a sieve.
Make two types of quenelles: one with parsley and one plain.
Before serving, squeeze lemon juice and add cayenne pepper to the soup.
Serve the fins as a side dish with turtle sauce or warm the turtle in a hot-water bath.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 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).