Name: Vegetable Omelet
Ingredients: cold vegetables (except potatoes, artichokes, cabbages, and turnips); butter; pepper; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Artichoke and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 140 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Omelet

Ingredients

cold vegetables (except potatoes, artichokes, cabbages, and turnips)
butter
pepper
coarse sea salt

Directions

Warm the cold vegetables in a skillet with butter.
Season the vegetables with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Add the seasoned vegetables to the omelet mixture before cooking.

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.

Artichoke + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together140 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together897 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,081 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Potato + turniptop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together562 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Artichoke + cabbagetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together31 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (artichoke, cabbage, turnip, butter, pepper):

Leekfits better
Lettucefits better
Cauliflowerfits better
Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against artichoke, cabbage, turnip, butter, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.