Name: To Roast a Fillet of Beef
Ingredients: 1 fillet of beef; sweet salad oil; lemon juice; coarse sea salt; black pepper

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Roast a Fillet of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Lard the fillet of beef.
Bind it carefully to a skewer with a small wire.
Cover the fillet with sweet salad oil and a little lemon juice.
Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Beef + lemontop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,278 recipes

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