Name: Jerusalem Artichokes Boiled with White Sauce
Ingredients: Jerusalem artichokes; salt; water; sweet cream; nutmeg; pepper; lemon juice

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 ↓

Jerusalem Artichokes Boiled with White Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Boil Jerusalem artichokes in salted water for 20-25 minutes, ensuring the water is boiling before adding them.
Make a white sauce by thickening the cooking liquid with sweet cream.
Season the sauce with grated nutmeg, salt, pepper, and a little lemon juice.
Remove the artichokes as soon as they are soft to prevent them from becoming hard.

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).
Jerusalem artichoke + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together48 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,318 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Jerusalem artichoke + lemontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together72 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together13,015 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).