Name: Porterhouse Steak
Ingredients: Porterhouse steak; slices of lemon; spray of parsley; currant jelly or any bright jelly

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Porterhouse Steak

Ingredients

Porterhouse steak
slices of lemon
spray of parsley
currant jelly or any bright jelly

Directions

Place the Porterhouse steak on a serving platter.
Garnish with a couple of slices of lemon or a spray of parsley.
Surround the steak with spoonfuls of currant jelly or any bright jelly.
If the jelly is firm, cut it into diamond shapes for decoration.

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.

Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Lemon + curranttop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,270 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Parsley + curranttop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together308 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).