Name: Game and Venison Soup
Ingredients: any kind of game or wild rabbits; slices of ham or bacon; 1 small onion, sliced; 1 small carrot, sliced; good stock; 1 head of celery; 2 tablespoons chopped parsley; seasoning to taste

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Game and Venison Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Skin and carve large birds; split small ones down the back.
Fry the birds with ham or bacon, onion, and carrot until browned.
Drain the pieces and place them in a stew pan with stock, celery, parsley, and seasoning.
Stew gently for 1 hour.
If using venison, fry small steaks and add them to the stew.
Serve the meat in the soup, removing the ham before serving.

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.

Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,173 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,810 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together21,601 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,518 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, ham, carrot, celery, parsley):

Turnipfits better
Parsnipfits better
Leekfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, ham, carrot, celery, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.