Name: Lemon Sauce for Boiled Fowls
Ingredients: 1 large lemon; 1 fowl's liver; ½ cup hot melted butter; salt to taste; pepper to taste; a small quantity of cayenne pepper

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lemon Sauce for Boiled Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

Peel the lemon and cut it into slices, removing all the seeds.
Boil the fowl's liver, chop it, and add it to the lemon slices.
Pour the hot melted butter over the mixture and stir well.

Serve

Serve in a sauceboat alongside the fowl.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,227 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Liver + buttertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,065 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Liver + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,375 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemon: Provides the sharp acidity that gives the sauce its bright flavour.
Fowl's liver: Adds richness and a savoury, earthy depth to the sauce.
Butter: Adds fat and a smooth, rich texture as it coats the lemon and liver.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.