Name: Cold Meat Sauce
Ingredients: chopped parsley; small piece of meat; salt; pepper; piece of onion; vinegar; grated bread

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cold Meat Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

In a saucepan, combine chopped parsley and a small piece of meat. Boil for 1 hour.
Strain the mixture and return the liquid to the saucepan.
Add salt, pepper, onion, and vinegar. Boil again.
Thicken the sauce with grated bread.
Serve cold meat sliced and warmed in the sauce.

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 + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together25,843 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,226 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).
Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,814 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, meat, pepper, vinegar, bread):

Shallotfits better
Capsicumfits better
Mustardfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, meat, pepper, vinegar, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.