Name: Stewed Mussels
Ingredients: 1 lb mussels; 1 cup cream; 2 tablespoons minced parsley; buttered toast or paper cases for serving

Why it works: Cream and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,392 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Stewed Mussels

Ingredients

1 lb mussels
1 cup cream
2 tablespoons minced parsley
buttered toast or paper cases for serving

Directions

Prepare the mussels

Steam the mussels in their shells until they open.
Remove the beards from the mussels.
Take the mussels out of their shells.

Make and combine the sauce

In a saucepan, make a cream sauce.
Pour the cream sauce over the mussels.
Add minced parsley to the mussels.

Serve

Serve the mussels in paper cases or on buttered toast.

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.

Cream + parsleytop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6,392 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Mussels: Provide the main body of the dish, with a tender, briny seafood texture.
Cream: Forms a rich sauce that coats the mussels and adds moisture and fat.
Parsley: Adds fresh, green aroma and a light herbal finish.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.