Name: Baked Turbot
Ingredients: Turbot; finely chopped parsley; coralline pepper; shrimp or lobster sauce (½ pint); lemon juice

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Baked Turbot

Ingredients

Directions

Arrange the baked turbot on a hot dish.
Sprinkle with finely chopped parsley and coralline pepper.
Pour the shrimp or lobster sauce around the fish.
Garnish with a few bunches of parsley.
Reheat the shrimp or lobster sauce thoroughly, add a few drops of lemon juice, and serve.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Turbot + shrimptop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together90 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Shrimp + lemontop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,923 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).