Name: Mushrooms Au Gratin
Ingredients: nice round cup mushrooms; bacon fat; 1 teaspoon chopped parsley; a pinch of thyme; thin lemon peel (size of a sixpence); pepper; coarse sea salt; bread crumbs

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Mushrooms Au Gratin

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Peel the mushrooms and scoop out the insides.
Chop the stalks, onion, parsley, thyme, and lemon peel.
Fry the mixture in bacon fat, seasoning with pepper and salt.
Add enough bread crumbs to fill the hollowed mushrooms.
Fill the mushrooms with the mixture and top with more bread crumbs.
Cook slowly in a covered stewpan with good fat.
Serve with a little gravy poured around.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,057 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,973 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

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