Name: Court Bouillon, for Dressing Fish
Ingredients: 1 gallon water; coarse sea salt; 3 carrots; 1 bunch parsley

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Court Bouillon, for Dressing Fish

Ingredients

1 gallon water
coarse sea salt
3 carrots
1 bunch parsley

Directions

Season 1 gallon of water with coarse sea salt in a large pot.
Add 3 chopped carrots and 1 bunch of parsley.
Bring the mixture to a boil and let it simmer to develop the flavors.

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.

Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots: Add sweetness and aromatic body to the broth as they soften and release their sugars.
Parsley: Contributes a fresh, herbal aroma that lifts the broth's savory flavor.

“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.