Name: Brown Gravy
Ingredients: 6 large onions; 10 pounds leg of beef; 6 cloves; 2 blades of mace; 2 carrots; 2 turnips; butter for greasing

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Brown Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Butter the bottom of a thick stewpan.
Peel and cut the onions into thirds, laying them flat in the stewpan.
Cut the beef from the bone into large pieces and place it over the onions.
Chop the bones and add them to the stewpan.
Add the cloves, mace, carrots, and turnips to the stewpan.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,873 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,233 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together21,601 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, beef, clove, carrot, turnip, butter):

Thymefits better
Parsleyfits better
Celeryfits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, beef, clove, carrot, turnip, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.