Name: Fried Sweet Peppers
Ingredients: Sweet peppers; Coarse sea salt; Flour; Cottolene (or cooking oil)

Why it works: Pepper and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,459 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Sweet Peppers

Ingredients

Sweet peppers
Coarse sea salt
Flour
Cottolene (or cooking oil)

Directions

Prepare

Cut the sweet peppers open crosswise and remove the seeds.
Slice the peppers and soak them in cold water for 15 minutes.
Sprinkle with a little coarse sea salt and dust with flour.

Fry

Heat cottolene in a pan and fry the peppers for 5 to 6 minutes.

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 + flourtop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together50,459 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet peppers: Provide the main vegetable body that softens and browns when fried.
Flour: Dusting creates a light coating that helps the peppers brown and hold together in the pan.
Cottolene or cooking oil: Conducts heat to fry the peppers and adds richness and browning.

“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.