Name: Trout in Green Sauce
Ingredients: ½ anchovy; 1 tablespoon capers; 1 tablespoon chives, minced; 1 tablespoon parsley, minced; ⅓ cup butter; 2 teaspoons flour

Why it works: Capers and chive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 245 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Trout in Green Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

In a mortar, beat together the anchovy, capers, chives, parsley, butter, and flour.
Keep the trout hot while boiling this mixture with the cooking liquid.
Serve the trout with the green sauce.

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.

Capers + chivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together245 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,550 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Chive + parsleytop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,150 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Capers + flourtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,024 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Anchovy + caperstop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together473 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (anchovy, capers, chive, butter, flour):

Parsleythe original
Tarragonfits about as well
Garlicfits less well
Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against anchovy, capers, chive, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.