Name: Forcemeat
Ingredients: 2 cups soaked bread; 1 teaspoon chopped parsley; 1 teaspoon chopped thyme; 1 teaspoon white pepper; 1 teaspoon salt; 1 small onion, finely minced; 1 ounce butter; 1 egg

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Forcemeat

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the bread in cold water.
Melt the butter in a pan and fry the minced onion gently until tender.
Squeeze out the moisture from the soaked bread and break it up finely.
Stir the bread into the cooked onion, then add parsley, thyme, pepper, and salt.
Add the whole egg and mix well.
Spread this mixture on the meat as desired.

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.

Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,057 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Thyme + oniontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,171 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together25,843 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,662 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, parsley, thyme, onion, butter, egg):

Marjoramfits better
Capersfits better
Sagefits better
White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, parsley, thyme, onion, butter, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.