Name: Squab Pie
Ingredients: Mutton cutlets; Onions; Apples; Pepper; Coarse sea salt; Sugar; Suet crust; Mushroom ketchup

Why it works: Sugar and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 260 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Squab Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Trim excess fat from the mutton cutlets and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Place the cutlets in a pie dish.
Cover with a layer of sliced apples sprinkled with sugar and blanched chopped onions.
If the pie is large, add another layer of cutlets and cover again with onions and apples.
Top with a good suet crust and bake at 400°F (200°C).
Once done, pour out the gravy from the side and remove the fat.
Add a spoonful of mushroom ketchup to the gravy and return it to the pie.

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.

Sugar + ketchuptop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together260 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,626 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Mutton + mushroomtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together685 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 apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, onion, pepper, sugar, mushroom, ketchup):

Lemonfits better
Limefits better
Red currantfits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion, pepper, sugar, mushroom, ketchup. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.