Name: Fish Salad
Ingredients: firm cold fish; pepper; coarse sea salt; French mustard; lemon juice; olive oil; Worcestershire sauce; oysters or shrimps (optional)

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 Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Remove the skin from the fish and pick out the bones.
Mince the fish finely.
Add pepper, coarse sea salt, French mustard, lemon juice, and olive oil to the fish.
Mix well together.
Just before serving, pour a little Worcestershire sauce over the salad.
Optionally, add oysters or shrimps to the mixture.

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).
Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,922 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Mustard + olivetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,950 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Fish + oystertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together496 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together15,430 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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, pepper, mustard, olive, sauce, oyster):

Lemonthe original
Limefits about as well
Avocadofits less well
Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, pepper, mustard, olive, sauce, oyster. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.