Name: Kidney Omelet
Ingredients: 2 sheep's kidneys; 1 ounce butter; pepper; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Kidney Omelet

Ingredients

2 sheep's kidneys
1 ounce butter
pepper
coarse sea salt

Directions

Prepare the kidneys

Skin the kidneys and cut them into small dice.

Cook and serve

Fry the diced kidneys in butter for 5 minutes.
Cook an omelet and place the fried kidneys on top.
Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Fold the omelet over the kidneys 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.

Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Sheep's kidneys: Provide the main filling, with a firm, savoury texture once fried.
Butter: Fat that fries the diced kidneys and adds richness and browning.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.