Name: Oyster Soup.— Potage Aux Huitres
Ingredients: 1 neck of mutton; 14 potatoes; 2 carrots; 2 egg yolks; ½ cup thick cream; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; spice to taste; 2 quarts water

Why it works: Potato and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and 3,107 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Oyster Soup.— Potage Aux Huitres

Ingredients

Directions

Cut the fat from the mutton and slice it into neat cutlets.
Place the cutlets in a stewpan with the water.
Peel the potatoes and wash and scrape the carrots, then add them to the stewpan.
Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Simmer gently until the mutton and vegetables are tender.
Strain off the stock and pass the potatoes through a sieve.
Mix the strained potatoes with the stock.
Add the egg yolks and stir over low heat, ensuring the soup does not boil.
Finally, add the cream, mix well, and serve very hot.

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.

Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together3,107 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together14,555 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together8,305 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together5,442 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Potato + creamtop 17% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together2,481 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the carrot

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

Spinachbetter flavor fit
Asparagusbetter flavor fit
Capsicumabout as good a flavor fit
Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, potato, egg, cream, pepper. 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).