Name: Potage À LA Crécy
Ingredients: carrots; stock (made from bones, meat, scraps, herbs, onion, parsley, carrot, celery, salt, and pepper); butter

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 10,172 recipes mention both. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

carrots
stock (made from bones, meat, scraps, herbs, onion, parsley, carrot, celery, salt, and pepper)
butter

Directions

Boil enough carrots in the prepared stock until thoroughly cooked.
Drain the carrots and pass them through a sieve to create a puree.
Mix the carrot puree with enough stock to achieve a consistency slightly thinner than your desired soup.
Melt a piece of butter in a saucepan and add the puree mixture.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together10,172 recipes

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

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together8,053 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Parsley + celerytop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together6,805 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together34,118 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Celery + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together16,001 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, meat, parsley, celery, pepper, butter):

Potatobetter flavor fit
Capsicumbetter flavor fit
Tomatobetter flavor fit
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, meat, parsley, celery, pepper, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).