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Dessert

Dinner for a Week

A weekly dinner plan including vegetable soup, lamb chops, beets, rice, eggplant, tomatoes, lettuce, blackberry pie, sweet milk, and coffee.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Eggplant and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Dinner for a Week

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare 1 cup of vegetable soup.

  2. Season and grill 1 pound of lamb chops.

  3. Boil and serve 2 cups of beets.

  4. Cook 2 cups of rice according to package instructions.

  5. Slice and fry 1 eggplant until golden.

  6. Slice 2 tomatoes and serve fresh with 1 head of lettuce.

  7. Bake or serve 1 blackberry pie.

  8. Pour 2 cups of sweet milk.

  9. Brew and serve coffee.

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.

  1. Eggplant + lettucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together19 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Eggplant + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together651 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 recipes

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

  4. Rice + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

  5. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb chops
Seasoned and grilled, they provide the main protein and browned, savory surface.
Rice
Cooked by package directions, it provides starchy bulk that absorbs the meal's sauces and juices.
Eggplant
Frying until golden browns its surface and gives it a soft, tender interior.
Beets
Boiling softens them and adds earthy sweetness and color to the plate.

Swap the blackberry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, rice, eggplant, tomato, lettuce, milk, coffee):

  1. Cherryfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Blackberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, rice, eggplant, tomato, lettuce, milk, coffee. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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