Name: Wheat-ears
Ingredients: Wheat-ears (small birds); 1 egg (for brushing or dipping)

Why it works: Wheat and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,225 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Wheat-ears

Ingredients

Wheat-ears (small birds)
1 egg (for brushing or dipping)

Directions

Truss the wheat ears for roasting.
Brush each bird with the yolk of an egg or dip them in a mixture of beaten egg white and yolk.
Roast the birds according to your preferred method.

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.

Wheat + eggtop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,225 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat-ears (small birds): The main ingredient; its meat firms and browns as it roasts.
Egg: Egg yolk brushed on the birds gives a glossy, golden browning as they roast.

“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.