Name: Seasoning Salt for Pies
Ingredients: ½ pound white pepper; 1½ pounds coarse sea salt; ½ ounce mace (optional); ½ ounce mixed nutmeg and cloves (optional); ¼ ounce sweet basil (optional); dried thyme (optional); dried parsley (optional)

Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Seasoning Salt for Pies

Ingredients

½ pound white pepper
1½ pounds coarse sea salt
½ ounce mace (optional)
½ ounce mixed nutmeg and cloves (optional)
¼ ounce sweet basil (optional)
dried thyme (optional)
dried parsley (optional)

Directions

Mix the white pepper with the coarse sea salt.
Optionally add mace, mixed nutmeg and cloves, and sweet basil to the seasoning salt.
Prepare dried thyme and parsley separately to use as desired.
Use about ½ ounce of this mixture for each pound of meat.

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.

Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,057 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,686 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Basil + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,768 recipes

Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).
Basil + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,351 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together4,108 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

White pepper: Adds sharp, pungent heat and aroma to the seasoning blend.
Coarse sea salt: Provides the salty base and carries the flavour of the other spices evenly.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white pepper, nutmeg, clove, basil, thyme, parsley):

Marjoramfits better
Winter savoryfits better
Allspicefits better
Macethe original

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

“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.