Name: Stuffed and Baked Peppers
Ingredients: sweet green peppers; salad plants (like lettuce); stuffing of choice

Why it works: Pepper and lettuce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,037 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Stuffed and Baked Peppers

Ingredients

sweet green peppers
salad plants (like lettuce)
stuffing of choice

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Slice the sweet green peppers in half and remove the seeds.
Prepare your stuffing of choice.
Fill each pepper half with the stuffing.
Place the stuffed peppers in a baking dish.
Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until the peppers are tender.
Serve warm.

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.

Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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