Name: Pot-au-feu
Ingredients: 1 Savoy cabbage; water; coarse sea salt; 1-2 lumps of hard, brown bread or 1 French roll; vegetables (carrots, turnips, parsnips, leeks); boiled beef; curled parsley for garnish

Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pot-au-feu

Ingredients

Directions

Boil water with salt in a saucepan.
Add the cabbage and cook for 20 minutes.
Remove half the water and replace it with some of the bouillon.
Drain the cabbage when done.
Break the bread into a soup tureen and pour the cabbage cooking liquid over it.
In a soup plate, combine the vegetables and cover them.
Serve the vegetables with the soup.
Arrange the boiled beef in the center of a dish with the cabbage cut into quarters and the vegetables nicely arranged.
Garnish the beef with sprigs of curled parsley.

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.

Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,046 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together590 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Parsnip + leektop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together165 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,097 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
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

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, carrot, turnip, parsnip, leek, beef, parsley):

Beetrootfits better
Shallotfits better
Chivefits better
Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, carrot, turnip, parsnip, leek, beef, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.