Name: Maitre d'Hotel Sauce
Ingredients: ½ cup scouce blonde; ½ cup finely minced curled parsley; ¼ teaspoon spiced pepper; 1 egg yolk; 1 tablespoon lime juice

Why it works: Pepper and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 3,491 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare scouce blonde as a base.
Finely mince the parsley after blanching and drying it.
Mix the minced parsley, spiced pepper, and lime juice into the scouce blonde.
Remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg yolk.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Pepper + limetop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together3,491 recipes

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

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together34,118 recipes

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

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together547 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + eggtop 11% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together18,323 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-hexanol (resin, flower).
Pepper + eggtop 22% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together48,824 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, pepper, egg):

Lemonbetter flavor fit
Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, pepper, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).