Name: Fish Cakes
Ingredients: potatoes; cold fish (salt or fresh); pepper; coarse sea salt; nutmeg; lemon or lime juice; flour; fat for frying

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Fish Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the potatoes, then strain off the water and mash them.
Finely chop the cold fish and add it to the mashed potatoes.
Season the mixture with pepper, coarse sea salt, nutmeg, and a squeeze of lemon or lime juice.
Mash everything together until well combined.
Form the mixture into small round cakes, using a little flour to bind them.
Fry the cakes in a small amount of hot fat until browned on each side.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,318 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together13,015 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,052 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,623 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, flour):

Arrowrootfits better
Spinachfits better
Shallotfits better
Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.