Name: To Roast a Fowl with Chestnuts
Ingredients: 1 fowl; 12 chestnuts; ¼ pound bacon; parsley; sweet herbs; pepper; coarse sea salt; white wine; butter

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Roast a Fowl with Chestnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the chestnuts until tender, then remove the outer and inner coats.
Pound 12 chestnuts in a mortar.
Parboil the fowl's liver and beat it smooth with the bacon.
Add chopped parsley, sweet herbs, pepper, and salt to the liver and bacon mixture.
Incorporate the pounded chestnuts and fill the fowl's crop and body with this mixture.
For the sauce, pound the remaining chestnuts smooth and mix with a few spoonfuls of gravy and white wine in melted butter.
Pour the sauce over the fowl 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.

Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Chestnut + parsleytop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together313 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
White wine + buttertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,083 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Chestnut + peppertop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together826 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together28,563 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, pepper, white wine, butter):

Chickpeafits about as well
Beansfits about as well
Walnutfits about as well
Chestnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, pepper, white wine, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.